“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.
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.
