1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mora, Pat. Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems About Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. ISBN: 978-0375843754.
2. PLOT SUMMARY
In this young adult-focused collection of poetry about love, Pat Mora covers the whole experience of the emotion, including aspects from romantic love, family love, friend love, infatuation, heartbreak, and death. Each poem recognizes people of different ages, backgrounds, cultures, sexualities, and life experiences, and provides a comprehensive representation of the strong emotional connections that complete us, ruin us, and propel us forward as a species.
3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Pat Mora's exploration into the human experience of love is both a tribute to the bliss and complexity of the emotion and also a lyrical instruction manual to understanding the personal destruction it can leave in its wake. What's elegant about this collection is that it takes two different avenues of poetry education and blends them together to give readers a whole picture of her concept. On the left, throughout the book, Pat Mora introduces different kinds of poetry like couplets, sonnets, tankas, letter poems, tercets, etc. These may be literary devices and types of writing that teens are not familiar with. But rather than bogging them down in instruction, she gives them a simple definition and then guides them through the process in her poems. Noticing how she uses the structure of the different poetry in her work is a wonderful way to teach about writing poetry.
Mora's poems are filled with all kinds of diverse life experiences that will likely relate to a young adult audience. For example, in "With Feeling" Mora portrays a young student who is frustrated that the adults in her life are always demanding feelings from her, as if she, as a teen, doesn't feel emotionally overwhelmed all day long. "Where's the feeling?/ My piano teacher growls./ I struggle to contain/ tears, giggles, fears, hate, anger,/ and love, so much love, all have me spinning/ in my purple-green-red-black-yellow private vortex/" (101). Some of Mora's poetry is very emotionally heavy, while others, like "Opposites" is very lighthearted and sweet (136-137).
Mora also uses some of the common themes in Hispanic American literature and some common literary devices of bilingual authors to give substance to the cultural heritage of the characters in her poems. She makes use of interlingualism and code switching in some of her poems going between English and Spanish. Or she offers an entire poem in Spanish and then in English. Her poem "Conversation/Conversación" is a delightfully flirty exchange between one person who is an English speaker, but speaks very basic Spanish and the girl being talked to, who only speaks Spanish (45). Reading the poem is like watching a text message of banter back and forth, hoping for a glorious outcome.
In "Mariachi Fantasy" a character relates to the mariachi performer's emotional expression, when she is unable to show her own while being in proximity of her love interest's girlfriend: "head thrown back,/ singing/ letting all his inside feelings/ rip/ out into the desert/ like I'd like to do" (21).
In addition to young love, Mora explores many themes of family love — particularly devotion to grandparents, which is a powerful part of Hispanic heritage. However, her poem "Sisters" is also a delightful representation of how familial love can make life worth living. She also makes important connections through poetry by having characters and narrators address life's hard questions like, "Who am I?", "Do people see me?", "Am I broken?" and more. These are all vital parts of the adolescent experience related to growing up. Mora doesn't leave any groups out. She works to connect everyone to love's intrinsic and attractive web without sacrificing any authenticity.
4. AWARDS AND REVIEW EXCERPTS
Eureka! Children's Non-fiction Award, Silver Honor, California Reading Association
Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, American Library Association
America's Commended List, Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
From School Library Journal
"Peppered with Spanish, the selections define the emotion in countless ways. The quiet lyricism of some lines will prompt many readers to roll them over and over on their tongues."
From Kirkus Reviews
"The poet's voice is multifaceted: tender, humorous, and joyful but also profound... The author employs an extraordinary diversity of poetic forms."
5. CONNECTIONS
So much of poetry for children is taught only in elementary school by Shel Silverstein's work or in high school by reading canonized literature including Shakespeare's sonnets or Robert Frost. It is not an educational norm - yet - to learn poetry from multicultural authors. Pat Mora's collection of poems about love manages to transcend any kind of boundary someone might attempt to put on it because of her heritage, while she also embraces and elevates multicultural themes, particularly for Spanish speakers in a very real and authentic way. Listening to Ms. Mora read her own poetry and talk about writing can provide great insight and bring more Hispanic students to poetry through representation and inclusion.
Building upon the knowledge formed from reading Dizzy in Your Eyes, young adults can further their exploration into poetry written by authors of Hispanic heritage through Pat Mora's collection My Own True Name: New and Selected Poems for Young Adults (ISBN: 978-155852921) and Gary Soto's A Fire in My Hands (ISBN: 978-0544104822).
No comments:
Post a Comment