Rumba Atop the Stones
A richly complex continuum of voices and characters inhabits these poems. An ecstatic hermit cultivates saints’ body parts in a hothouse by the sea. A washerwoman invokes Oshún, orisha of love, while scrubbing laundry, and then a songbird magically appears.
Price
£7.99
Author(s)
Orlando Menes
ISBN number
9781900715492
Pages
90
Price
£7.99
Classification
Poetry
Country setting
United States of America
Cuba
Publication date
01 Jun 2001

A richly complex continuum of voices and characters inhabits these poems. An ecstatic hermit cultivates saints’ body parts in a hothouse by the sea. A washerwoman invokes Oshún, orisha of love, while scrubbing laundry, and then a songbird magically appears. A fisher’s acolyte son 'flies from island / to island, wreathing with rain-lilies / light houses, masts, and campanili'. An exiled Caliban meditates on the music of lifeless creatures as a source of power and aesthetic revelation. A communist Afro-Cuban dockworker rails against sugar as the black man’s curse, while on a sugar plantation European Jewish immigrants and black cutters celebrate their common diasporic heritage. His verse rich in imagery and metaphor, the poet constructs a cosmic vision of the Caribbean that weaves African, European, and indigenous elements into a vibrant new synthesis, creating islands at once strange and familiar, haunting and sublime. Orlando Ricardo Menes writes poetry of baroque imagination and passionate energy.

'Cuban-American Orlando Ricardo Menes is not only a compelling poet, he’s a storyteller, telling his stories in the first person or in a charged and compressed narrative. The poet touches all bases - magic realism, humor, irony, horror, mystery, mysticism - laced with references to tropical flora, fauna, history, and the melding of African and European religious mythologies.' 
Phyllis and David Gershator, The Caribbean Writer.

Variations

Orlando Menes

Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Peru in 1958 to Cuban parents. His father owned a furniture manufacturing and retail business until in 1968 a military coup toppled the government and began expropriating foreign owned businesses. In that year his family moved to Miami and, with the exception of a couple of years in Spain in the 1970s, Menes lived there until he moved to Chicago in the 1990s. He currently lives in Notre Dame, Indiana.
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