Customer Reviews

Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos (New Directions Paperbook)

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Baca writes extremely strong poetry: vivid, keenly observed, brutally honest. He looks squarely at experiences most modern poets would not consider appropriate material and reports them as he sees them. I am extremely grateful for the vision of his work. The group called Meditations on the South Valley are honest to the point of being brutal--but it's a very different thing when a true poet is brutal--and Baca is a true poet. There is a strong sense of personal growth in his poetry, as represented in the scope of this book. The last two sets, Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande and Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande are absolutely ecstatic. The poet is outside himself, not in anything as tawdry and sticky as rapture, but in true ecstasy: yes, the world is "nasty, brutish, and short" but it is also ladened with redemptive moments of vision, purified in the fire of experience. If you've ever wondered what poetry the other, non European, voices of America are committing to the pages of our literature, you could do much worse than to start with Jimmy Santiago Baca.