In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together—just as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healers—into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- I LANDSCAPE WITH HUMAN FIGURE
- On New Year’s Day
- Nightfall in Asturias
- Quatrains for a ShrinkingWorld
- The Blackouts
- Ghazal in a Time of War
- Outside Fayetteville
- What I Would Give
- For My Brother’sWedding
- Landscape with Human Figure
- II SPEAK TO ME
- In Praise of Experience
- October Afternoon, 1986
- Oysters
- Your Black Eyes
- Playing ‘‘Fidel and Perón’’
- On Valentine’s Day
- Last Hours in Florence
- Speak to Me
- Poem for My Familiar
- After Losing Him
- III AFRAID OF THE DARK
- IV UNDETECTABLE
- Phone Messages on Call
- Undetectable
- Spiritual, ca. 1999
- On Thanksgiving
- The Same Old Place
- Supernumerary Poem with Fruit Pastries that
Allegorically Addresses Death
- On the Virtues of Not Shaving
- The Four Humours
- V QUESTIONS FOR THE WEATHER
- The Age-Old Problem of Sentimental Verse
- The Couple
- After the Weekly Telephone Call
- For a Dear Friend Who Is Grieving
- Love Poem Written Especially for You
- Living with Illness
- Doberman Pinscher, Dreaming
- Upon Overhearing, ‘‘Anyone Can Write Like Elizabeth Bishop’’
- You Can Just See the Cynicism
- Cuban Canticle in Five Parts
- On Christmas Eve
- The Beech Forest
- In Case of Emergency Landing
- Questions for the Weather
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