An Anthology of Lovemaking and More

Alchetry - Poems by Diego Quiros
Review by Missy McEwen

"For five years I filled a light green

three ring binder with poems about you...

Poems describing stares, kisses

and the taste of sweat. An anthology

of lovemaking" -- From Black Rings

And that is what Alchetry is -- an anthology of lovemaking, even though Diego Quiros has a poem titled I Will Not Write About Love. That poem is even about love. And love is a good thing. This book is full of thighs, kisses, touches and love: beautiful love. Everything about love is beautiful in Alchetry. "Heartache is beautiful," Quiros writes in Déjà Vu and it is his language that makes it so. I would love to hear these poems read aloud by the author, although I can hear the music in lines like these even when reading them to myself:

"It is always the tropics
in my heart regardless of season
when I speak your name." - From Mantra


"...round little vowels
that ooze from your lips
like sweet ripened fruit…

My ears can see your face by the roundness of your ohs." -- From Ohs


"...you blew a kiss...
out the car window
towards where I stood.

It went in my mouth and rolled down my throat like moonshine." - From Keepsake

The language in this book is sweet -- not sappy, not sentimental -- but sweet and pleasing to the ear.

Sometimes, though, a line, a verse, would take me by surprise:

"Ass not flat...." -- From Rubbing Sticks


"It was you that bounced
on my hips in the darkness
but someone else's name that I called out." -- From Equestrian
Women


"Hips imitate the hammering of molten metal
heads titled back, mouths shaped like howling." -- From Rubbing Sticks


"She asked me to make love to her and
reach...spiritual ecstasy.
We did, and it was ecstatic, but I dismissed it
as good sex because good sex is ecstatic." -- From An Overdue
Apology

After reading those lines, I smiled to myself, because after all, underneath it all, Diego Quiros is still a man.

Not all of Quiros poems are about women, however. In Mango Tree, for example, a "child [holds his] grandfather's hand [while] standing by a mango tree in a small Caribbean town."

"[Grandfather] points to the fruit and asks:
'Would you like one?'
I answer: 'maybe tomorrow or the day after.'
How was I supposed to know there would be neither one."

In Young Man on the Bus Bench, Quiros paints a picture of the man for us:

"His face is smooth and thin
paralyzed with a tenor's expression.
His skin the shade of autumn skies."

Diego Quiros is a painter as well as a poet and I wonder if he has ever painted the picture equivalents of his poems because I can see Mango Tree and Young Man on the Bus Bench as paintings. Diego Quiros' work, whether it be poems or art, are vibrant with color and beauty.

Published by GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (2008) and may be purchased from Amazon or stop by http://www.mipoesias.com/.