Inventing the Americas by William Heath

For William Heath the islands and continents of what the Europeans were pleased to call the New World were not so much “discovered” by Christopher Colón as invented.  “The world in his head,” as Heath writes of Colón, “is not the one under his feet.”  Off the coast of Venezuela Colón sees the Orinoco splitting into four branches like the rivers of the Terrestrial Paradise and writes to Queen Isabella “I have just found the Garden of Eden.”  It is a paradise laid open to despoliation and rape.  Heath tells the story of the misapprehensions, misnamings and crimes of Colón and his companions in their conquest of this immense land with a poet’s eye, finding just the right moment, the right detail to distil this long tale of exploitation, enslavement and death in thirteen brief poems.  In the end Colón, the man ennobled as The Admiral of the Ocean Sea dies impoverished and the explorer and fabulist Vespucci gives his name to the lands Colón first reached, and in a sly reference to our own day

…America it remains, a land

where fact and fantasy merge,

and true histories are trumped

by pleasing myths.

 –Zeese Papanikolas, author of Savages