Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time.

Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time by Adrian Castro Coffee House Press, April 2005 $14, ISBN 1-566-89172-8

This is a particularly challenging read. Several of the poems are multilingual (English, Spanish, Yoruba or other African languages); and while there is a glossary that is fairly helpful, it helps if the reader has some knowledge of African religious practices or other aspects of Afro-Atlantic culture.

In Wise Fish, Castro casts a discussion of African migration and place into the mysteries, practices and spiritual traces that Africans carry from one shore to the other, and between life and death. These metaphysical deliberations allow the poet a different path to take in the work including shifting points of view.

For instance, in the poem dedicated to Katherine Dunham, "When She Carried a Calabash," the speaker says "they say" and "I say"--this internal call and response is repeated in several other poems. The poem features one of Castro's greatest strengths, his ease with mixing languages as the poem follows the "calm calabash" on a journey "magically opening a venous path /curled like a juju-man's caduceus / us baston de Babalawo" (Babalawo is a Yoruba priest)--a journey that takes the calabash and her possessor "way back home."

"The Birth of an Abiku" skillfully creates a world in which language, lore and longing uneasily meet--the world that makes both poet and priest: "The sole surviving shrill / that sung with history in its heart / & love on its tongue ... He grew & learned the same art / the hermetic dance of words / to do the same as they did to him ..."

Castro works hard to give the reader a different way to hear the music, see the signs or recognize that much of what we carry is not so easily available nor should it be.

--Reviewed by Patricia Spears Jones Patricia Spears Jones is a poet and author in Brooklyn, New York.