Gonzalez is a teacher, editor, essayist, anthologist, and short story writer (The Ghost of John Wayne and Other Stories [BKL O 1 01]), but he is a poet first and foremost, and in his resounding new collection, he contemplates the brutal fusion of culture and nature in Mexico and what is now the American Southwest. Gonzalez begins by evoking the fiery and brutal Spanish conquest, but not only has the desert soaked up the blood of massacred indigenous people, it has also absorbed the poison of atomic bombs and the suffering of endangered wildlife. Desert landscapes and cities emerge as sacred places defiled as the poet perceives the past to be inherent in the present and divinity under siege everywhere he looks. He writes of "dying candles," "radioactive rosaries," a "half-burned church," "empty shrines," a boy without arms, a woman without legs, mountain lions outfitted with radio transmitters, and, in the title poem, a hawk bound to its perch. These are tragic emblems of a broken and dishonored world, but not one without hope or beauty. The deep feeling intrinsic in Gonzalez's stunning elegiac visions is itself an antidote to despair, as is his compassion for all life and his bid for faith in the power of sacrifice. Donna Seaman
This seventh set of poems from Gonzalez (The Heat of Arrivals, etc.) seeks the pre-Columbian past, the newsworthy present and the envisioned future, imagining a varied cast of characters, among them Spanish explorers, Hopi priests, undocumented Mexican workers, European surrealists and the poet himself. Gonzalez grew up in El Paso, Tex., and that border city's tri-cultural matrix (Mexican and Mexican- American; Southwest Native American; Anglo) informs the historical inquiries many poems carry out: in "Abo National Monument, New Mexico," Gonzalez examines "Ruins for the sake of fighting time,/ not letting them go because we need to know/ how the low walls transcribed death...." Elsewhere, Gonzalez explores the present-day frontera or adopts the stance of an otherworldly prophet, calling down the "knotted fire of what does not speak." These free-verse poems of history and geography (among them the stanzas that give the volume its title) often sound both compelling and uneasy, as Gonzalez's speaker comes off as at once inquisitive, angry and shy. He seems at ease, by contrast, in the (perhaps less original) poems of private tenderness with which the volume concludes, where "love as lyric practice" evokes "the way you spin crushed herbs in the air." Trying always for sincerity, never for mere journalism or autobiography, Gonzalez can sound unduly circuitous, or simply talky, though he can also achieve conversational subtlety. His non sequiturs and deliberately simple diction can evoke Pablo Neruda (and Neruda's American fan James Wright, whom one poem names); applying those writers' techniques to his own Southwest, Gonzalez has at his best done something quite new.
