Rhina p espaillat biography

Full-length collection of original poetry from Rhina P. Espaillat, now available for pre-order from Able Muse Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Foyles, and other online and offline bookstores worldwide.

Gardening by rhina p espaillat

Rhina P. And after All displays the wit, wisdom, subtle voice, and supple mastery of forms that have established Espaillat as a contemporary master. This long-awaited collection from Espaillat is a treat not to be missed. They address the loss of loved ones and loved things of the world, but their extraordinary empathy and gentle wit keep them from becoming depressing or sentimental.

Savor this book and share it with people you love. Espaillat, more than any living poet in English, gives ordinary language the glow of the sacred. Workaday words, trite with custom like thin coins, accrue new resonance and weight; plain objects are haloed with aureoles like figures in gold mosaics. Saints with their visions used to do this: wave away the veils that separate our shallow perceptions from a deeper reality.

But not everyone is granted visions. How much harder it is to use the same words we all use and misuse, the same objects we all touch and ignore, common experiences we dismiss, and, by using words with precision, using the serendipity of rhyme, and the convention of metrical patterns, to give the reader the experience of revelation. Craft is not the opposite of inspiration, Espaillat reminds us, it is the only way to it.

Stallings, author of Olives. For most of its poems And After All is, as the title indicates, deeply elegiac in tone.