Poetry review – PADRE TIERRA
Charles Rammelkamp reviews Mariano Zaro’s poetic exploration of a complex parental relationship
Padre Tierra
Mariano Zaro, translated by Blas Falconer
artepoética press, 2025
$24.99, 126 pages
ISBN: 978-1-952336-33-1
With English translations by Blas Falconer on facing pages, the fifty short poems that make up Mariano Zaro’s Padre Tierra (one long poem divided into fifty “sections,” actually) depict a young boy’s veneration of his father, a farmer in northern Spain, as the boy is growing up.
The boy feels inadequate in the face of his father’s perceived manliness – not threatened, far from it, but still as if he may not be able to live up to the standard his father has set. The very title, Padre Tierra, suggests the magnitude of his awe, the standard of manhood against which he implicitly measures himself. Rather than translate this affectionate, wondrous title by which Zaro refers to his father, Falconer tells us in his Foreword that in consultation with the poet, he decided to leave it in the Spanish, and throughout the father is called “Padre Tierra.” “Father Earth” might sound misleadingly New Agey, whereas “Fatherland” has nationalistic connotations that are disingenuous, distorting. “Padre Tierra” is both archetypal and descriptive, for his father knows the land and all the flora and fauna in it. He is veritably a lord of the land.
At the same time, if not overbearing, the father is confident and assertive. In the very first poem, the boy recalls going to his parents’ bedroom during the heat of August as a six-year-old boy and seeing his father’s masculinity draped over his thigh as he slumbers on his bed. (‘Tu sexo descansa sobre / la piel rubia del muslo.’) The boy’s ‘temples burn.’ This is an almost Freudian incident, not that the boy feels hostile towards his father, in the classic Oedipal sense, just in awe. Overall, he feels loved, protected, but it’s a primal scene that sets the tone of wonderment and esteem throughout this impressive collection.
Indeed, in the fourth section of the poem, some neighbors seem to be questioning the son’s manliness, and Padre Tierra steps in the correct them.
Vienen algunos vecinos
a ver qué pasa.
El hijo lleva flores en el pelo.
Dicen en las calles.
Sin flores el mundo
se muere de hambre.
Eso dices, Padre Tierra,
con los brazos sobre la mesa.
When the neighbors gossip in the streets that the boy wears flowers in his hair, Padre Tierra responds that without flowers the world would die of hunger, his powerful arms resting on the table as he rebukes the scandalmongers.
Throughout, Zaro focuses on his father’s hands. In the twelfth poem he writes about waking up thirsty, his father bringing him grapes as he lies in bed. ‘Tu mano me salva,’ he declares (‘Your hand saves me.’). But later in the poem he confesses, ‘I fear I am not / who you want me to be.’ Perhaps Zaro has already realized that his life will be in the world of the intellect, not on the farm. Is this who his father expects him to be? Is it his sexuality that troubles him? (‘temo no ser / quien tú quieres que sea.’)
‘Tus manos son la paz / que no tengo,’ he starts the sixteenth section. (‘Your hands are the peace I don’t have.’) Zaro elaborates on the power of his father’s hands. In Falconer’s translation this reads:
You open your hands, they grow
like roots that never cease,
like glacial streams
in granite basins.
They grow through the dirt
that knows all.
Wow. The majesty of those hands could not be declared more powerfully. You see Zeus, Poseidon and Hades all wrapped up in the image. Indeed, in a later section, the 21st, Zaro writes:
The reeds tremble,
move with the wind,
but I think it’s you,
Father, you who breathe
and calm everything
with your breath, born
from your parted lips.
(‘creo que eres tú / Padre, tú que respires // y todo lo ordenas.’)
The poems (“sections,” as Falconer calls each numbered piece) are all short, most of them fewer than sixteen lines, typically only eight or four lines. Zaro wastes no words but creates vivid images. The seventeenth reads in full:
Abres un atlas de cien páginas
sobre mi pupitre. Estudia bien
los rios, me dices.
Estamos hechos de rios.
Pongo me dedo sobre
deltas y desembocaduras
como si pudiera palpar
tus venas, Padre Tierra.
In Falconer’s translation this reads:
You open a one-hundred-page atlas
on my school desk. Study
the rivers well, you say
We are made of rivers.
I put my finger over
deltas and river mouths
as if I could touch
your veins, Padre Tierra.
Again, Zaro has elevated his father here to mythical proportions, and yet he does it with the innocent reverence of a child. This is not exaggeration for the sake of some misguided, obsequious veneration.
But Padre Tierra is not invulnerable. He is a man, after all, and he falls ill. The son, naturally, is alarmed.
One day you fall ill, Father,
but your hands still heal.
Their bones ring
like the rim of a bell.
A farmer, Padre Tierra’s hands are vital to his livelihood, his very identity. Yet Padre Tierra is not invulnerable. In section 20, we encounter him lying in a hospital bed. Outside his window he watches the birds. Padre Tierra predicts snow, and indeed it snows. He is wise, even in his illness.
The recurring theme of the poet’s sense of inadequacy finds expression in the 39th section in which he describes his own hands:
Mi mano es pequeña.
No puedo, como tú, desatar
la soga húmeda bajo
la furia de la tormenta.
His hand is small. He can’t, ‘like you,’ untie the wet rope in the fury of the storm. Indeed, throughout this section, the poet repeats ‘I can’t…I can’t…I can’t’ (‘…trust bulbs,’ ‘…imagine / the happy return of fruit’ ‘…breathe / in the sleet’). How moving the poet’s confession of his impotence.
Yet the long poem ends on an affirmation. Maybe the poet will not “follow in his father’s footsteps,” but they are united in love and honor. In a sense they are one, father and son. The final four-line section reads:
Pasos y heridas simultáneos, Padre Tierra.
Aperturea y cicatriz, Hijo Tierra.
Heridas y pasos que nos forman.
Cierro los ojos. Respiramos.
In Falconer’s translation, these lines read:
Footsteps and wounds, Padre Tierra.
An opening and a scar, Son of Earth.
Wounds and footsteps that form us.
I close my eyes. We breathe.
What a lovely final thought: Respiramos. We breathe.
Mar 5 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Mariano Zaro
Poetry review – PADRE TIERRA
Charles Rammelkamp reviews Mariano Zaro’s poetic exploration of a complex parental relationship
Padre Tierra
Mariano Zaro, translated by Blas Falconer
artepoética press, 2025
$24.99, 126 pages
ISBN: 978-1-952336-33-1
With English translations by Blas Falconer on facing pages, the fifty short poems that make up Mariano Zaro’s Padre Tierra (one long poem divided into fifty “sections,” actually) depict a young boy’s veneration of his father, a farmer in northern Spain, as the boy is growing up.
The boy feels inadequate in the face of his father’s perceived manliness – not threatened, far from it, but still as if he may not be able to live up to the standard his father has set. The very title, Padre Tierra, suggests the magnitude of his awe, the standard of manhood against which he implicitly measures himself. Rather than translate this affectionate, wondrous title by which Zaro refers to his father, Falconer tells us in his Foreword that in consultation with the poet, he decided to leave it in the Spanish, and throughout the father is called “Padre Tierra.” “Father Earth” might sound misleadingly New Agey, whereas “Fatherland” has nationalistic connotations that are disingenuous, distorting. “Padre Tierra” is both archetypal and descriptive, for his father knows the land and all the flora and fauna in it. He is veritably a lord of the land.
At the same time, if not overbearing, the father is confident and assertive. In the very first poem, the boy recalls going to his parents’ bedroom during the heat of August as a six-year-old boy and seeing his father’s masculinity draped over his thigh as he slumbers on his bed. (‘Tu sexo descansa sobre / la piel rubia del muslo.’) The boy’s ‘temples burn.’ This is an almost Freudian incident, not that the boy feels hostile towards his father, in the classic Oedipal sense, just in awe. Overall, he feels loved, protected, but it’s a primal scene that sets the tone of wonderment and esteem throughout this impressive collection.
Indeed, in the fourth section of the poem, some neighbors seem to be questioning the son’s manliness, and Padre Tierra steps in the correct them.
Vienen algunos vecinos
a ver qué pasa.
El hijo lleva flores en el pelo.
Dicen en las calles.
Sin flores el mundo
se muere de hambre.
Eso dices, Padre Tierra,
con los brazos sobre la mesa.
When the neighbors gossip in the streets that the boy wears flowers in his hair, Padre Tierra responds that without flowers the world would die of hunger, his powerful arms resting on the table as he rebukes the scandalmongers.
Throughout, Zaro focuses on his father’s hands. In the twelfth poem he writes about waking up thirsty, his father bringing him grapes as he lies in bed. ‘Tu mano me salva,’ he declares (‘Your hand saves me.’). But later in the poem he confesses, ‘I fear I am not / who you want me to be.’ Perhaps Zaro has already realized that his life will be in the world of the intellect, not on the farm. Is this who his father expects him to be? Is it his sexuality that troubles him? (‘temo no ser / quien tú quieres que sea.’)
‘Tus manos son la paz / que no tengo,’ he starts the sixteenth section. (‘Your hands are the peace I don’t have.’) Zaro elaborates on the power of his father’s hands. In Falconer’s translation this reads:
You open your hands, they grow
like roots that never cease,
like glacial streams
in granite basins.
They grow through the dirt
that knows all.
Wow. The majesty of those hands could not be declared more powerfully. You see Zeus, Poseidon and Hades all wrapped up in the image. Indeed, in a later section, the 21st, Zaro writes:
The reeds tremble,
move with the wind,
but I think it’s you,
Father, you who breathe
and calm everything
with your breath, born
from your parted lips.
(‘creo que eres tú / Padre, tú que respires // y todo lo ordenas.’)
The poems (“sections,” as Falconer calls each numbered piece) are all short, most of them fewer than sixteen lines, typically only eight or four lines. Zaro wastes no words but creates vivid images. The seventeenth reads in full:
Abres un atlas de cien páginas
sobre mi pupitre. Estudia bien
los rios, me dices.
Estamos hechos de rios.
Pongo me dedo sobre
deltas y desembocaduras
como si pudiera palpar
tus venas, Padre Tierra.
In Falconer’s translation this reads:
You open a one-hundred-page atlas
on my school desk. Study
the rivers well, you say
We are made of rivers.
I put my finger over
deltas and river mouths
as if I could touch
your veins, Padre Tierra.
Again, Zaro has elevated his father here to mythical proportions, and yet he does it with the innocent reverence of a child. This is not exaggeration for the sake of some misguided, obsequious veneration.
But Padre Tierra is not invulnerable. He is a man, after all, and he falls ill. The son, naturally, is alarmed.
One day you fall ill, Father,
but your hands still heal.
Their bones ring
like the rim of a bell.
A farmer, Padre Tierra’s hands are vital to his livelihood, his very identity. Yet Padre Tierra is not invulnerable. In section 20, we encounter him lying in a hospital bed. Outside his window he watches the birds. Padre Tierra predicts snow, and indeed it snows. He is wise, even in his illness.
The recurring theme of the poet’s sense of inadequacy finds expression in the 39th section in which he describes his own hands:
Mi mano es pequeña.
No puedo, como tú, desatar
la soga húmeda bajo
la furia de la tormenta.
His hand is small. He can’t, ‘like you,’ untie the wet rope in the fury of the storm. Indeed, throughout this section, the poet repeats ‘I can’t…I can’t…I can’t’ (‘…trust bulbs,’ ‘…imagine / the happy return of fruit’ ‘…breathe / in the sleet’). How moving the poet’s confession of his impotence.
Yet the long poem ends on an affirmation. Maybe the poet will not “follow in his father’s footsteps,” but they are united in love and honor. In a sense they are one, father and son. The final four-line section reads:
Pasos y heridas simultáneos, Padre Tierra.
Aperturea y cicatriz, Hijo Tierra.
Heridas y pasos que nos forman.
Cierro los ojos. Respiramos.
In Falconer’s translation, these lines read:
Footsteps and wounds, Padre Tierra.
An opening and a scar, Son of Earth.
Wounds and footsteps that form us.
I close my eyes. We breathe.
What a lovely final thought: Respiramos. We breathe.