Solar Music by Elaine Alarcon

Elaine Alarcon grew up in Anoka, Minnesota.  She earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, where she studied under John Williams and Robert D. Richardson.   She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, has won the Woody Bartlett Poetry Prize twice, and also the Leon Priestnall Poetry Prize.  She now lives in California near the sea. 

PRAISE:

In Solar Music, inspired by the Spanish surrealist painter María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga, known as Remedios Varo, Elaine Alarcon guides readers across time and space to Spain during the civil war of the late 1930s, Mexico City, Morocco, and present-day southern California. These poems blend the senses as well as time in their relentless search for beauty. In “Adoration of Remedios Varo,” the speaker demonstrates her devotion to Varo by turning the places Varo lived into holy sites of pilgrimage and fantasizes about eating at her table “while a galaxy of plates spun a helix of candle shadows.” These poems contain animal familiars and ghostly instruments that will haunt readers long after we put the book down.

–Nina Clements

When I read Solar Music, I am heart-struck by the beauty and wonder in each poem and in the whole collection of poems, so skillfully woven with tragedy and joy. Elaine Alarcon’s book begins in Oxnard, CA with the poet caught up in the deaths marked by road-side shrines. For additional wonders, she tells us, simply follow/ the crosses on the map;/ you can’t miss them. She follows those crosses to Granada in the footsteps of Lorca whose lovely name fits/ inside the pocket of my own name/ like a wafer in my mouth. The crosses point her to the past and future. But tonight the accordion serenade/ beneath my window/ is a tune from my father’s guitar. The poet follows the crosses to Tangiers and then Mexico City. She writes there, inspired by surrealist painter Remedios Varo and travels to Tepotzotlan where her work is dedicated to Paul Bowles. Elaine Alarcon clearly believes that both poetry and travel enlighten and save us. Solar Music is a compelling narrative of her passionate search for this enlightenment as she reveals layers of love and art, of history on a small and large stage, of travel and return. If you delight in plunging into an environment’s sensual and emotional landscape; if you crave fresh language, intelligence and revelation, this collection with its emotional, artistic and historical complexity is for you.  

 —Mary Kay Rummel, author of Little River of Amazements: New and Selected Poems 

Hold my hand, poet Elaine Alcarnon seems to say, as she lures us through the poem worlds of Solar Music. From the ghost bikes of Oxnard, Minnesota to Lorca’s Granada where quinces and pomegranates sweeten the wind,  from a city in Mexico where she slept in a blue house wrapped in sadness to the Bay of Tangier where the wind and the white owl haunt the cypress tree, Alcarnon lays before us an irresistible path through quixotic landscapes in language that is both luscious and exact. But this no mere travelogue. In homage to the painting for which this collection is named, Alcarnon’s poems explore the liminal space between surreal and real and the power of memory to rise like music and carry us home.

Embark on a lyrical journey across continents and through time in Alarcon’s evocative collection of poetry. From the serene gardens of Granada and the haunting hills of Viznar to the seduction of Mexico City and the sun-drenched beaches of North Africa, these poems capture the essence of place and the lingering echoes of history. Encounter the poignant memorials of loss in Oxnard, the surrealist visions inspired by Remedios Varo and the vibrant energy of Tangier through verses that weave together observations of daily life with reflections on art, memory, and the unseen forces that shape our world.