Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek
Padre Tierra: A Poem in 50 Sections
Mariano Zaro
Translation by Blas Falconer
Artepoetica Press
Sept 2025, ISBN: 9781952336669, 123 pages
Padre Tierra is a great testament to how a translator can propel a book into a larger orbit. Translator Blas Falconer came across the original text of Padre Tierra (Olifante 2019) several years ago, and was absolutely inspired to share what he found. The global irony is, Zaro and Falconer were both living in Los Angeles when they first began their correspondence and collaboration.
With each individual section of the poem carefully translated from the original Spanish, the book length poem begins within the space of a home, a room and the day, exploring the natural landscape, a setting based on Zaro’s childhood growing up in rural Northern Spain, and the interrelationship between a father and son.
Zaro guides readers visually amongst his father’s features, and into his father’s voice. A voice that transforms into an instructive tone, telling the son to open the windows, effectively beginning the collection with a gentle, welcoming spirit.
Zaro crafts with clarity as the brief sections achieve great intricacy even through economy. And Zaro, who is notably a short story writer, curates an atmosphere in Padre Tierra that generates a narrative arc.
The setting opens beyond the rural village gates, and into the land surrounding the home. The father transformed into a physical extension of the land itself.
The clipped brevity as each section unfolds along with the declarative voice of the poem belies the complexity at hand as Zaro creates a palpably embodied and emotionally resonant experience.
The most endearing aspects of Padre Tierra are the moments of shared learning, the nurturing energy in the poem. In one section, the father’s hands grow into the earth with a gentle, non-disruptive knowledge of the life within it: “without disturbing / the geometric insects, / the blind passage of earthworms…”
The poem shines with all this rich interactivity. Memories become intimately present. The details are then folded back into the imagery and the curiosity of the poem returns with the father’s all encompassing wisdom.
For instance, the resting of birds after migration is reflected in the image of his father’s hands resting after work.
Rather than assuming mere comparisons in Padre Tierra, there is a hyper-closeness to profound connections, a reverence for the father’s body held in a vastness:
We are made of rivers.
I put my finger over
deltas and river mouths
as if I could touch
your veins, Padre Tierra.
The collection oscillates from innocence to an atmosphere of pain and loss, adding depth. The father interwoven and pressed back upon the earth in all its various stages of growth and death. The son joins with the father in exploring the web of intrigue around them.
That a praying mantis
eats the spiders slowly.
First, nibbling on the legs,
one by one, like celery stalks.
By breaking up the poem into sections, Zaro creates effective pauses that allow readers to appreciate the quietness of each piece. There is deft use of rhythm in the collection, a compression.
I hide,
not wanting you to see me.
Your unmoved temper spits out
what I am not.
I hide
in the currant bush. Shelter,
sour dome of red sparks
weightless in the dark.
There is an expansiveness to Padre Tierra that urges readers to pause with a straightforward poetics that ultimately honors a relationship loved into myth itself.
It is refreshing to read such devotion, not only to the words as they stretch between languages, but the deep adoration inherent in the poem, and the collaboration that brought its transformation into being yet again.
About the reviewer: Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She is a current MFA student and has a MA in Poetry from Wilkes University.
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