Café Select - Softcover

Rivera, William McLeod

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997262907 ISBN 13: 9780997262902

Publisher: Poets Choice Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

“Truth, a dominatrix/asserting love is all...” W.M. Rivera writes in “Prelude,” one

of the opening poems in the book you are holding. Truth can be pleasurable, and

painful all at the same time, like love and sex. This exploration of truth and love as

double edged sword runs through

Cafe Select.

Rivera’s poems are lusty gems,

there’s a fighting spirit, and a wise one at work in these poems, sometimes wrestling

with itself, other times wrestling with the great spiritual chink in our armor, other

people and their influence upon us.

Rivera kinks it up in

Cafe

, and I’m not just talking about sado-masochistic sex, or

a lusty young couple in heat, the lines of these poems screw into each other creating

a dense tough lyricism that is coupled with gritty reality:

these ‘sperm on the wing.’

Most won’t make it.

Some end up in luxuriating in Rimbaud’s bathtub boat

on a pond in Tuileries Gardens. Some labor

growing pains on death-row’s dry concrete.

In suburbia most land on fertile ground.

Even the run-amucks multiply in manicured cracks.

Rivera’s describing dandelions seeding into air in “Manicured Cracks,” how most

won’t make it, that the seeds of the weed, the most iconic of spring youth images,

faces a fate like all of us. They might live on to flower again, or they won’t. As human

counterparts, many of us will die along the way, and often the worst of us, the

weeds, thrive. What I like is the music in Rivera’s poems. The alliterative urge, the

hard consonant sounds, very much like later Seamus Heaney, acting like sharp

edges to confine and crib the lines and feet.

Poetry and art are created by privilege, and these poems are unabashed at their

modernist raiment made possible by a privileged life. Paris is both the geographical

and figurative heart of the book. Paris, the literal city, and Paris the epitome of cul-

ture. Rivera is at home on both fronts, and relies on music to drive his poetry for-

ward; the imagery, well that’s extra sauce for the pudding, and whether he’s

referring to the city of lights, to art in a gallery, or to ancient Occidental poem, it

doesn’t matter. For Rivera their origins are the same. The urge to create, to be re-

born.

About this title

About the Author

W. M. (William McLeod) Rivera is a retired agricultural educator. His academic background includes a B.A. from the University of North Carolina, M.A from The American University in Washington, D.C, and Ph.D. from Syracuse. He taught agricultural extension and development at the University of Maryland (UMCP) from 1981-2009. After retiring from UMCP, he has dedicated his energies to writing poetry. Three collections of his poems have been published, and he was a nominee for the Pushcart Prize in 2012. Insights and experience from his birthplace, New Orleans, his career specialties and travel working in over 15 countries, provide much of the context for his poems. "Le Select," the Montparnasse café in Paris, provides the imaginary background from which he reviews his experiences and life's ventures. He and Miguel Condé met in Mexico in the late 1950s. Both have Mexican fathers and American mothers. Both love art. Their pathways have continued to come to- gether, as do the poems and images in this book.

Edition details

• Publisher: Poets Choice Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0997262907
• ISBN 13: 9780997262902
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 138
• Editor: Harteis Richard