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 Oshun, 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 AfroCuban 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.