Mark Statman’s Hechizo
Mark Statman, Hechizo, Dialogos Books, 20220, ISBN 978-1-944884-96-3. In his previous collection , Exile Home . Statman rode the stimulus of the landscape in Oaxaca and an enhanced intimacy with the Spanish language to create an elegant, subtle, and lyrical poetic mode . ( Statman easily could have mined this mode for three or four books, made this more refined, Stevensian posture the f r ame of the latter part of his oeuvre. Instead, Hechizo goes in the opposite direction: jagged, unfettered, letting its art stem from the soul. A n incantation , but in a speech more excitable than gaudy. ( “Mexican songs” begins with the poet saying that their “sound sometime s/holy sacred to me/ like/synagogue prayers/ from when I was young.” But the sacredness becomes m...