The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Known for his superrealism and magical images born of the imagery of the Chicano/South Western culture, Ray Gonzalez gives new imagery and intensity to the mystery and common miracles of that culture, the passionate reclamation of identity.
Ray Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and editor born in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of five books of poetry, including The Heat of Arrivals (BOA 1996), which won the 1997 Josephine Miles Book Award for Excellence in Literature, and Cabato Sentora (BOA 1999). He is the editor of twelve anthologies and serves as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review.
Also available by Ray Gonzalez:
The Heat of Arrivals
TP $12.50, 1-880238-39-X o CUSA
Cabato Sentora
TP $12.50, 1-880238-70-5 o CUSA
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.