SOURCE: Hill, W. Nick. A review of Panoramas. World Literature Today 72, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 619-20.

In the following review, Hill describes Cruz's poetry in terms of his skillful juxtaposition of Spanish and English.

Panoramas is the most varied collection of Victor Hernandez Cruz's writings to date, carrying out a project that may be as true of him as it is of what he observes in the essay “Writing Migrations”: “From the very beginning of his writing life … Marti began to swallow the whole panorama of the Americas.” Cruz's singing voice, which is still full, rich, and ready for the play of words in the panoramic sense of using English, Spanish, and the migrations between, has most often been the subject of its own expression—in poetry, that is. But Cruz writes from a secure position from which Panoramas becomes a natural mode of discourse, and it opens like the...