SOURCE: Olszewski, Lawrence. A review of Panoramas. Library Journal 122, no. 16 (1 October 1997): 86.

In the following review, Olszewski discusses Cruz's poetry in terms of the themes of bilingualism and cultural displacement.

This book [Panoramas,], a poetic quintet offering both prose and poetry, develops a set of variations around the themes of displacement and bilingualism. The opening autobiographical essay, “Home Is Where the Music Is,” leads into the second segment, “The Age of Sea Shells Revisited,” the focus of which is the clash of cultures. The staccato rhythms of the third set, “Pana/Ramas,” conjure up the spirit of Cruz's Puerto Rican homeland, from which he emigrated as a lad. In the fourth section, the poet defends his Spanishness and ars poetica (“Poetry is a river in the language. Paddle and you will get there”) and recapitulates the theme of migration from his earlier Red Beans. The poems of the coda...