Lorna Dee Cervantes and Her Poems Analisys Essay

Lorna Dee Cervantes is a famous poetess that represents Chicana literature. The main subjects of her poems are cultural background, gender differences and economics. It should be mentioned that she is interested in the urgent problems that demand an immediate solution. Lorna Dee Cervantes is the winner of  the American Book Award and Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. Her poems such as “Uncle’s First Rabbit”, “For Virginia Chavez”, “Visions of Mexico”, “The Body as Braile”, “Emplumada”, and “My Dinner with Your Memory” have a lot in common as all of them reveal cultural differences between the lives of Anglo Americans, Mexicans, African Americans, and Native Americans. The poems also reflect the language problem.

The first similarity is that all these poems depict events of the real life. For example, in “Uncle’s First Rabbit”, uncle’s love of hunting is described. However, hunting does not bring him pleasure but guilt, reproach and pain. From the first sight, every poem written by Lorna Dee Cervantes shows the readers usual things. However, the poetess is able to make these usual things  unusual and powerful.

The next similarity of these poems is that they have the same powerful impact on the reader. The poet constantly communicates with her reader. For example, in the poem “For Virginia Chavez”, it is mentioned, “you don’t believe this, but they’re not shooting at you”. Without doubt, one should admit that Lorna Dee Cervantes always defends language, weak women, and defenseless animals. 

One can notice that the author’s moods, such as anger, furiousness, indignity, dissatisfaction, and rebellion are expressed in all these poems. For example, in the poem “Visions of Mexico”, Lorna Dee Cervantes expresses anger about the stereotypes that are present in the lives of Mexicans.

I am convinced that these poems are the masterpieces, which must be learnt and passed to the future generation as the great examples of literature.