In challenging times such as these, it is good and necessary to have books like “Poems of Love” to remind us of the fundamental force of love and its potential to transform our lives and the world.
Santa Maria resident and author Viviana Hall is a writer, journalist, and clinical social worker. Her first book “Miedos” was published in her native Buenos Aires in 1977.
In this first bilingual edition, Poems of Love emerges as an inspiration for joy, gratitude, and compassion. Writer Cesar Tiempo says: “ Viviana’s poetry reconciles us with hope, one of the few movements of the soul capable of battling despair”.
Hall hopes to ignite love in the hearts of readers. She says, “My passion in life is to see a world connected in harmony. One in which every human being without distinctions can prosper”. All readers can take something from this extraordinary piece.
Hall came to the United States as a press correspondent based in New York, where in 1982 a re-edition of “Miedos” and her second book “Poemas del Cielo y de la Tierra” were published.
As a journalist she produced, wrote and hosted various documentaries, variety, and public service programs for New York broadcast television. This work earned her numerous distinguished awards. She also wrote locally and abroad for several prestigious publications.
As a clinical social worker, Hall collaborated during the last decades with the state of New York, in the implementation of programs to create opportunities for underprivileged youth. Hall is passionate about Life, which she says is all about love in its multiple manifestations.
This volume opens with both English and Spanish versions of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd.” Hall then segues into bilingual poems about absence, be it in the form of love for a stranger or a country no one has visited.
“Summer” describes an intimate encounter in the hottest of seasons, while “Down River” traces the speaker’s nature walk as she reminisces about her lover: “Every day at dawn, / I recover in my arms / the original caresses when / our bodies rediscovered one another.”
“Poem of Love” details how the whole world and even the stars seem to worship the speaker’s beloved. She considers the power the moon has over lovers in “You Stole the Moon From Me” and mourns the dual losses of a birch tree and a partner in “Farewell.”
In “Anticipation,” she imagines a future life, full of family, food, and laughter, with her love interest.
“Love in the Time of Coronavirus” wonders about what humanity has learned, if anything, from the COVID-19 pandemic. The poet concludes with “That Man,” which evokes spiritual, if not blatantly biblical, imagery as it imagines a deity walking along the ocean’s shore, “deciphering the human enigma.”
Hall has mastered brevity; as Whitman himself might say, her poems contain multitudes even when they span as few as seven lines. Her poems drip with desire in verses like “To voice your name, / my lips hunger, and / savor every syllable until I’ve said it.”
Her descriptions of the physical world are vivid and entice the senses, as when she writes of a garden where “white flowers perfume the air, / hummingbirds nibble nectar” and recalls “the heart of a rose beating in / the palm of my hand.”
Her translations are not only grammatically accurate, but also aptly convey deep emotions in both English and Spanish. If there is a flaw in this collection, it is that some of the poems could have been further fleshed out; the author often leaves readers wanting more.
A masterful volume of poems that captures the sensuality of love in two languages.
