Review of Rosemary Catacalos: On the Life and Work of an American Master

Cloud Cardona
4 days ago
5 min read

I hear echoes of Rosemary Catacalos everywhere in San Antonio. I work at Gemini Ink, where my supervisor tells me stories about Rosemary, who served as executive director for nine years, and her meticulous attention to detail. I listen to poet Jim LaVilla-Havelin speak lovingly about Rosemary and how much he misses her. I hear her poetic influence in this new generation of San Antonio poets, who might be unfamiliar with her work, but the legacy of Rosemary’s empathetic poetry is still felt.

This new collection from “The Unsung Masters Series,” published by the University of Houston, is a treasure trove of rare and out-of-print poetry by the late San Antonio poet. Not only is this a unique collection of Catacalos’s poems, but it also includes essays and a couple of poems from her colleagues and friends, such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Cary Clack, ire’ne lara silva, and Arthur Sze, to name a few. This collection not only showcases the work of a brilliant poet but also paints a portrait of her community. Catacalos is a beloved poet, and this collection points to that fact.

Through spending time with this collection of Catacalos’s poetry and essays written by her friends and colleagues, I saw how deeply she valued global empathy, humanity, and friendship. As editor Maha Ahmed eloquently notes in her essay, “Rosemary understood poetry as an ongoing question of humanity, of who possesses it, of how to make noumena out of incomprehensible violence.” There is an infectious optimism and love for people in Catacalos’s poetry. For example, in her poem “Morning Geography,” dedicated to Naomi Shihab Nye, Catacalos writes:

The way just now,

still drugged with sleep, I supposed a loud flower could save us, tell us

something about sweetness when half a world away a man tends to a fire in the street before his tiny rug shop, a short distance from some broken

buildings. He breathes the thick signals of burning tires, decoy smoke to make the bombers think they’ve already struck here.

There is a sweet balance between reality and optimism felt throughout many of Rosemary’s poems. She does not shy away from the realities of war, detailing this man in his rug shop, grasping for survival by using decoy smoke. Yet Catacalos also makes room for the beauty of this world through the image of the flower, reminding us that it can “tell us something about sweetness.” In a postmodern way, Catacalos not only uses the flower as a reminder of the world’s sweetness, but the poem itself is also a reminder that we can build alternate peaceful realities in our art.

To read a Rosemary Catacalos poem is to bear witness; she reminds us that we have so much to learn from the people around us. In her poem, “Learning Endurance From Lupe at the J & A Ice House,” Rosemary recounts a man, Lupe, from El Salvador who presumingly escaped the Salvadoran Civil War and now sweeps floors at the J & A Ice House in exchange for a few beers. The poem recounts the traumatic, lasting effects of war and yet still shows the speaker’s belief in the enduring human spirit. Catacalos offers a ladder out of the darkness, saying:

Now Lupe has been operating on what some people

call dim for a long long time. Nobody can

even remember how he got that way or if he was born that way or what.

But I am here to say that he’s a man to talk to when you feel like if you tried

to plant a flower it would just die or that if you tried to scream nothing but flat silent air would come out.

Catacalos offers us this perspective of hope, this refusal to yield to understandable pessimism by addressing what others have said about Lupe and then offers us her perspective, stating, “But I am here to say that he’s a man / to talk to when you feel like if you tried / to plant a flower it would just die.” She flips what could be written as a story of pity, into a study of endurance but this flipped perspective does not cancel out her horror at what Lupe has gone through. She retells his story in the poem, and asks, “Lupe, Lupe, what are we to do / when everywhere God is committing suicide / and every one of us is God?” Catacalos’ poetry concerns itself with the world’s multifacetedness, never letting go of hope, even in the face of depravity.

Catacalos is direct, with cutting observations about both the interior and external world. There were many lines I underlined in this collection, out of praise for their boldness. For instance, in "Poison in the Eye of the Beholder” the poem is split into two sections, where the first explores a woman’s impatience and disgust with the old men around her, and in the second, she asks these elders for forgiveness. In the first section, she details her aversion, “I am unable to transform them. / They are embarrassing, graceless. They are doing nothing but dying.” In the second section, the speaker shifts her perspective:

Ancianos, forgive me.

All my life you have given me

song and lessons and hope.

And now because I let myself turn ugly, I fix you with a dead stare.

The love has gone out of my seeing.

This balance of honesty is what I consider to be an essential quality of poetry. Catacalos’s style is upfront, straight to the heart of what she feels, like “The love has gone out of my seeing.” She directly asks these elders for their forgiveness, leaving no room for misunderstanding. "Poison in the Eye of the Beholder” like many of Catacalos’s poems, captures a double-sided outlook on the world.

Reading these poems by Rosemary Catacalos and various essays by her colleagues is a salve for the soul, reaffirming the importance of a poet and their contributions to the community. I am so grateful that Catacalos’s poetry wasn’t lost in the sands of out-of-print poetry collections, hidden away in personal collections, or sold by Amazon book resellers for $83. Catacalos is a poet that cuts through cynicism, and reminds us how necessary it is to find hope in the world around us.

Cloud Delfina Cardona is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket, winner of the Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series. Cardona is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a non-profit that publishes Texan writers. She is an associate at Letras Latinas.