American Book Review

In her poem "The First Body is the Water," a title calling the reader into the interconnections that run through Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem, the poet writes, "Body and water are not two unlike things—they are more than close together or side by side. They are same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine." As the litany of words at the end of this passage bears witness, they "are same" not because of some brute identity, but rather because they are bodies sharing being, energy that is prayer moving in a current, motion that is medicine. In this poem engaged in multiple modes of translation—"Every text remains in mourning until it is translated," the poet quotes—these words in motion emphasize a translation that is also transformation, a realm where Diaz moves and dwells.

In the title poem, Diaz plays on words by ringing their changes: "I've been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, / can stop the bleeding." The "blood" of "bloodstones"—a healing stone so named because its hematite component gives it red specks—transforms into the literal blood of "bleeding" from snakebite. This spilling of blood and talk of a wound then move into a concern with war in relation to what bloodstone can do: "most people forgot this / when the war ended." No sooner do I ask what war this line refers to than I find the poem anticipating the question, stating, "The war ended, depending on which war you mean," and going on to list possibilities that include "those we started, / before those, millennia ago and onward, / those which started me." In a poem of such elemental images as "bloodstone," "the jaspers of our desires," a "flash flood" that "bolts the arroyo," and "bodies like wounds," I think it's fair to regard these "wars" that go back "millennia ago and onward" as the struggles of our shared evolutionary past, whose marks, energies, and impulses we still carry, and whose will to dominate continues to motivate the wars of our very day, as it motivated the colonization in the wake of which these poems take their shape. As these poems aver, the struggle to channel our more aggressive energies in creative and socially just directions continues.

The poem then shifts to a seemingly different kind of struggle as the speaker declares, "I was built by wage," and within the same line, the word "wage" shifts to a verb:

            So I wage love and worse—always another campaign to march acrossa desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skinsettling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.

This verb commonly associated with war—as in "to wage war"—here associates with a love infused with the imagery of war, from marching to the flash of cannon to smoke, the latter two images directly associated with the beloved's body. As Diaz writes in another poem, "This is the war I was born toward, her skin" ("Skin-Light"). This love, embedded in struggle, translates potentially destructive energies into a love that unites by means of a vital tension. It's a complicated poem about a complicated love, a love poem that is also a poem of agon.

These poems' multiple transformations signal a sensibility attuned to a world in movement, unending transformation, unexpected combinations and syntheses:—"Energy is a moving river moving my moving body" ("The First River is the Body"); "One way to love a sister, help her bleed light" ("Blood-Light"); "one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale" ("These Hands, If Not Gods"); "The coyote answers by lifting its head / and crying stars" ("Manhattan is a Lenape Word"); "we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court" ("Run 'n Gun"); "Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. / Transubstantiation bone" ("Ode to the Beloved's Hips"); "We must go beyond beyond to a place where we have never been the center, where there is no center—beyond, toward...