Epic Series

Eléna Rivera
(Shearsman Books, 2020); pbk, £12.95

Eléna Rivera’s riveting collection of long poems, Epic Series, swims out into the complexities of identity, questioning what it means to be and become, to belong simultaneously to oneself and to one’s generational tree. Her unnamed narrator

            wants to glide softly over
                        the cold ocean like a Monarch
                                    butterfly, plunge into its opacity[.]

In ‘Unknowne Land,’Rivera’s narrator is moved by the circular, wavelike motion of memory, desperately swimming against her past. Memories break the surface of her present life and swallow the woman in grandeur histories of conflict, translocation, injustice and chronological change.

Rivera splits her narrator’s identity in two: the mainland and the island, which ‘the sound of the sea separates.’

            Herself and myself––The pacific crashes
                        and the threat of that wide open
                                    beach[.]

The narrator’s identities, separated by childhood and adult memories, are balanced, precariously, until tercet stanzas in ‘Water’ erode the distinction between them and Rivera’s narrator becomes overwhelmed by the recollection. Remembrance is a riptide; it crosses swells and creates a confused psycho-geographical sea state.

            Suddenly all breaks––splits
                        As I drive from one side,
                        to the other, a childhood drenched
            “Now these are the generations of…” 

Ancestry underpins and holds together the narrator’s view of herself and the world in which she belongs.

Epic Series is composed of three long poems, each one having been previously featured as self-contained small press publications. Structured as a triptych, Rivera’s poems –– ‘Wale; or The Corse,’ ‘Unknowne Land’ and ‘The Wait; for Homer’s Penelope’ –– bridge her narrator’s relationship with past, present and future. Mature and deeply provocative, the language in Epic Series calls attention to itself as language. For example, the alliteration, assonance, and rhythmic quality of her poems with only one word per line pitch a visual and audible exhalation of grief. In ‘Wale; or The Corse,’ Rivera’s narrator sighs,

I
rise
ridge
glide
re
dry
She
swam
one
place
you
read[.]

The lines above foreshadows the narrator’s watery, inescapable flight in ‘Unknowne Land.’ This reference emphasises life––across generations, its circuitous sorrow and hope, and it wonders about the relationships between birth and belonging. Do we belong to the people who bore us? Or do we, instead, belong to the things we bear?

Visually, these exhale poems are written on the left side of each page in ‘Wale; or The Corse,’ followed on the opposite page by a quote and explanatory poem. These quotes, often interspersed throughout the collection, are drawn from various literary works, including but not limited to The Bible, Twelfth Night, Moby Dick, The Europe of Trusts, War and Peace. Rivera deftly weaves these quotes into the substructure of Epic Series. Her choice of typography––quotes over italicisation––softens and neutralises.

Epic Series is an exploration of written language. Her narrator writes because

Her heart will not be quiet, quiet girl.
She said she longed for some awakening
through memory but no one understood[.]

She cannot voice the grief that is bent ‘in a small / scalp-knot.’ Her grief is not heard but felt by fingers in her hair. Maybe the reason she swims is because no one

would understand [her] closed book and
looking at its size, give up that sail[.]

In ‘Fire,’she leans forward

                       elbow
down on the desk, full
of North wind; a figure
shown, shorn, fastened
to too many voices.

It is worth mentioning that Penelope’s forbearance in Rivera’s final poem ‘The Wait; for Homer’s Penelope’ is mirror reflection of her own quiet self from sections one and two.

Shanley McConnell