Alexis Gomez Rosa

Sorrento Alexis Gomez Rosa

And in this universe of Gómez Rosa's, the textual universe of encyclopedic poetry and boxing and the 1965 invasion and everything else, New York appears and reappears-the New York where the poet has evidently spent some years-New York, his second city: the Dominican New York that has come into existence during this last half-century; the New York of Washington Heights and Harlem and St. Nicholas Avenue. Sometimes he strikes a grand tone in evoking this New York of his. A poem called Tiemann Place (which is a street one block long in Upper Manhattan, down the hill from Grant's Tomb) begins: Tall and erect, solitary and nervous, Surged from the heart of Whitman, borders (a cosmos) the street, which toward Tiemann Place ends in an asphalt dome. House of General Grant, house awaiting its history, first circle of the trees: early morning. which, apart from invoking Whitman, invokes faintly the great Darío and his own salute to Whitman, from more than a century ago. Darío was a genius at presenting himself as a tragic figure-a man of heartbreak. Gómez Rosa is not so weepy. He does tell stories, though. The poem about Grant's Tomb moves down the block to an apartment on Tiemann Place where, as the birds begin to chirp at dawn, the poet gets up to depart from a lover's bed. "The whole of you was a pair of eyes ... " I love the poem. The romance of New York is in that poem-the New York of Whitman and Grant, a Civil War New York, as observed in a post-1965 Dominican Spanish whose memories pass through Darío.