Exiliana

by Mariela Griffor

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. In her collection of poetry, EXILIANA, Mariela Griffor expresses her innermost thoughts in words of not her mother tongue in rich, beautiful, passionate verse unlike any... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0978147103
• ISBN13: 9780978147105
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Luna (SK)
• Length: 73 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Rising New and Renewed from Paradox

When one is stripped of country, home, family, lover, to what does one cling? Mariela Griffor will always have language, her chosen tool to rebuild. In this, in her poetry, she takes root. She has found a new home, even as her heart aches for another home in the distance of time and place. She has made her home in a new country, surrounded herself with a new family, and her poetry attests new love. Yet... In the passing of the years the grief does not disappear. Griffor has lived a life as complex as a novel, rich and filled with loss and tragedy and redemption. Born in Concepcion, a city in southern Chile, she was involved in politics from age 15, fighting for democracy and against the Pinochet dictatorship. Her first great love was a comrade in arms, and he was killed as such, even while she, still in her early 20s, carried his child and was forced into exile. Life tossed her first to Sweden, then a new love to the United States, where she now lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, today a poet and publisher, founder of Marick Press. If a poet's biography rarely makes it to the top of a book review, but is left usually as an after note, Griffor's story is unavoidable here, for Exiliana is a song of her exile, of love for home old and home new, of an undefeated if still sometimes suffering spirit. Her history is in her poetry, her scars give it its meter, her passion its rhythm, her strong spirit its vibrancy. In her first poem, "Prologue," Griffor sets the stage as an outsider, one standing apart, yet even then, defining a new way to continue her life. I invent a friend to pour out remembrances of the old country. Out here, I invent new sounds, new men, new women. I assassinate the old days with nostalgia. I don't see but invent a city and its people, its fury, its sky. I don't belong to the earth but to the air. As I invent you, I invent myself. When roots are not allowed to sink into the soil where one stands, one grows them in air, easily moved from place to place, rooted instead in those invented men and women, and in that newly invented life. Griffor's song of exile will resonate with anyone who is at home away from home, perhaps in poetry offering home to others likewise uprooted. She captures that paradox neatly--of embracing one while longing for the other, past and present, old and new, dark and light, somehow managing to remain fully faithful to both. Her poems are the letters of a lover, and her love is even more fierce for its testing. She pays the cost of loving so fiercely, but it is that ferocity of spirit that is her key to survival. Her poems travel from her long ago home of Chile, to a rainy day in Michigan, wander along the cold streets of Scandinavia. Her poems dig down into coffins where lost lovers lie, soar to distant mountaintops, linger in a child's all-seeing eyes, scratch with long nails at jealousy and envy, and know more than one moment of simple truth. Her poems sear love with its loss, accept new love