Acts of Love

by Edgar Gabriel Silex

Overview

In his third book of poetry, Edgar Gabriel Silex explores the ways love confronts us. Devastatingly honest, these poems begin with "children transported in confusions of love" and examine relationships within the family and with lovers, and "how our love, for our most precious things, is soiled with our shameful behaviors, by our acceptance of doubt and melancholia." The general movement of the poems is affirmative, traveling from the pain of childhood trauma through understanding to the point where the narrator is able to break the cycle of violence and conclude "we will remember / everything in beauty."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931896061
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Edition description:	Poaetry
Pages:	68
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

EDGAR GABRIEL SILEX is the author of Acts of Love (Curbstone Books, 2004) and Through All the Displacements (Curbstone Books, 1995). He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Maryland State Council for the Arts. He lives in Laurel, Maryland and teaches at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Table of Contents

Theory of Mind
Aftermath
The Shadows of Words
The Feminist's Daughter
Acts of Love
For Chris
Hell
In the City of Angels
The Creator
Matins
Rwandan Spring
Aubade
Departure
Distances
My Brother's Song
Elegy
The Library of Lost Souls
Dream Fish
On the Way to Giant's
Girl on the Threshold
Chief Nanay Appears in the Holy Land
Fin de Siecle
Fireflies
Ode With a Lament
Pathogenesis
For Cesar Chavez
Returning the Gift
Story
Chain of Becoming
Latin Kings
The Evening Route
The Myth Game
Freedom
Swastika
What We've Made
The Existentialist
On Prayers and Angels
How to Write a Poem
Haiku
Titles of Books Recently Purchased by the Woman He Had Finally Left
The Gift
Your Silence
Sage
Haiku
Everything Breathes
The Beautiful Thread

Editorial Reviews

"Edgar Gabriel Silex is a storyteller. His poems understand and relate the stories of our spirit, our history, our possibility, and they ask us to forgive ourselves. I believe him to be a wonderful poet. Wonderful."—Lucille Clifton


"The poems in Acts of Love challenge individual experience with the largest of spiritual contexts: for Edgar Silex compassion and conscience are cosmology. His universe, though scarred with streets and chilled with violent rooms, surrounds the human world with a seamless intelligence. In never looking away, Silex ultimately comes to a view of beauty. Closer in, his words never let go of the hands of those who have suffered." —Sandra McPherson


"Ultimately, despite his willingness to look at the uglier side of human love, Silex moves toward healing and hope, recognizes that 'these torments are unspoken prayers / by which we learn grace and wisdom,' that the 'divine . . . makes a gift of each day.' We will, he says 'remember / everything in beauty / we will remember everything / in beauty / that is the thread / we are woven from." —Jessica Powers, New Pages

From the Publisher

Parents and kids, pride and political fear, abuse and recovery from abuse make recurrent themes for Silex's fluent and punctuationless free verse, a style halfway between Lucille Clifton (one of Silex's mentors) and W.S. Merwin. Religious language flows freely here-"everyone seeks/ what is sacred," he writes, "to be rid/ of the evil born in us." Openhearted in the presence of children but enraged at the injustice of adults, Silex's speaker seems to have survived particular evils; several poems mention self-destructive impulses (self cutting, the suicide of a friend) and pay tribute to the grandparents who raised him. Other works examine large-scale sufferings, from the Rwandan genocide to the travails of migrant laborers. Born in El Paso, now teaching at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Silex shows particular attraction to the resilient folkways of Native Americans, though Latino, Palestinian and African-American subjects get a look-in as well. Adapting Western forms to global concerns ("Aubade," "Ode with a Lament") Silex (Through All the Displacements) can succumb to clich ("the only choice/ children have is to make laughter and play") or to left-wing platitude ("forty thousand children die/ each day because of words/ like free markets democracy"). Silex's sophomore volume nevertheless ably fuses personal testimony with multicultural history, asking "how many contradictions it takes/ to bring one human into being." (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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