Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

Jimmy Santiago Baca (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: April 27, 2007

In a Whitmanesque voice that aims toward American universals, while remaining grounded in his Chicano ancestry, Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of life in beautiful and accessible poems.

In Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande, Jimmy Santiago Baca continues his daily pilgrimage through the meadows, riverbanks, and bosques of the Rio Grande where winter dies, spring explodes, and inextricable links between the human spirit and the natural world are revealed—"the river and I see through each other's skins / behind the eyes into the tunnels of water-bone and rushing marrow."

These poems expand upon those in Baca's Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande—his visions of love and loss, poverty and renewal, redemption and war are reflected in the rocks, trees and animals of his beloved New Mexico. In Spring Poems the words of the river "rise around thorny thickets / then descend again into the burbling stubble," and the poet surrenders himself to this place where his own words are woven by "a thumb-nail-sized yellow spider/ with poppy seed eyes."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Once imprisoned, now celebrated nationally as a performer, poet and memoirist (A Place to Stand), Baca returns to the terrain, forms and concerns of Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004) in this perhaps less ambitious sequel. Vivid free verse alternates description of the Texas-Mexico border (a site for the poet's regular walks and runs) with hopes and fears for the poet and for his nations. "Landscapes of war,/ people starving,/ refugees waving for us to help them" represent the hard politics of the present, competing for attention with the poet's difficult past ("when my life/ blew from street corner to street corner/ in menial work") and with what seem to be memories of sex addiction, the years when "my love/ was a madness." Baca tries both to envision a brighter future and to live fully, attentively, in the present, noticing both clear spots of natural beauty and incursions of things manmade, from the feather of a long-sought blue heron to "the green irrigation pipe-gates/ that mark the end of my run south." Fans of his earlier performance poetry may appreciate his new work's warmth, or wish it edgier, less suffused with optimism ("what is broken God blesses"). Against all his worries, all his reasons to despair, Baca again and again turns back to the border landscape he loves and trusts: "The Rio Grande bosque/ doesn't lie-when it's ready to show affection/ it does."
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From Booklist

Baca continues his meditation on seasons, beginning where his previous collection, Winter Poems along the Rio Grande (2004), left off. The Rio Grande, as both setting and symbol of freedom and life, meanders through the poems, evoking a natural progression of time and the natural ebb and flow of feelings such as love, hope, and connection. The bosque along the river is home to birds both resident and migratory, trees, fish, bushes, insects, and encroaching urban life represented by power lines and interstate traffic noise. Jogging here, Baca evinces a love of his hometown of Albuquerque but, even more, reveals his well of poetic inspiration: Chicano, Catholic religiosity, Native American symbolism, and universal milestones. River, season, and life all cycle in natural harmony, and offer both mirror and magnifying glass, allowing access to our deeper truths. With its highly accessible language and thoughtful reflections on the natural world, readers will find Baca's poetry extremely inviting. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 75 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1st Ed. edition (April 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811216853
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216852
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #662,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars What Is Broken Is What God Blesses, March 27, 2010

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John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

Santiago Baca's powerful struggle to reinterpret life and living in terms of nature, started in Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande, continues and is brought to a stunning conclusion in the final poem, "What Is Broken Is What God Blesses." Gradually through the Spring poems, he welcomes more and more people into his conversation with nature, his ancestors, people from his past, current friends and lovers, the other self with whom he has shared his life, strangers whose presence is evident from the footpaths that break from his running trail and head for the river, tiny footprints in the dust, or the chain sawed trunks and branches cleared from the same path. We often have to separate things to clearly understand them before reuniting them. Only a poet could say it so well, could take you along and help you experience every step of the process, could bring you so successfully to the end, banged up and new.