You & Yours: Poems
by Naomi Shihab Nye
BOA Editions, 104 pp., $15.50 (paper)
The Religion of Hands: Prose Poems and Flash Fictions
by Ray Gonzalez
University of Arizona Press, 160 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Calling a writer’s poetry “accessible” is sometimes an oblique way of saying their work is simple. San Antonio-based writer Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is accessible, but this is no backhanded compliment. Her newest book of poetry, You & Yours, features more of her clear-eyed work that examines the small, overlooked moments, “a diminutive tendency,” she explains in her poem “Fold,” “in a world given often to the sprawling and huge.”Divided into two sections the You portion of the book focuses on life in the present; observations, memories, small delights experienced in daily life or while traveling. Many of Nye’s poems are funny. In her “Please Describe How You Became a Writer,” she cites the “insulting” Dick and Jane books as a possible explanation. “Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?”
In the “Yours” section, Nye expands her focus to include the larger, war-torn world. Because she is steeped in both the Arab and the Western worlds, her thoughts on finding the commonality where difference is assumed are sobering. Though they’re not overtly protest poems, in pointing out the absurdities of war talk and revealing the Arab world’s human face, no one can walk away from Nye’s work without realizing how language, in the wrong hands, has been used as a weapon of mass distraction.
Ray Gonzalez’s The Religion of Hands demands the reader’s full attention. It would be easy to dismiss his work as merely playing at poetry, until one realizes that after reading some of his pieces, you find yourself staring down at yourself wondering, how did I get here? The good news is that you’re not irritated or worried about how or when your feet will return to the ground. You rather enjoy the unexpected place Gonzalez’s work has transported you to.
“Coming from the isolation of the desert has given my personal identity the need to fuse both the natural landscape with human experience,” the El Paso native said in a 2001 interview. The material with the spiritual, the ordinary with the fanciful, the present with the past are all effortlessly fused in work that is often stunning in its ability to engulf the large and the small in one stroke.
“Who were you when the stars were misinterpreted as the fingertips of God? Do you believe in the corridors of the grand hotels? How often do you preserve a pulled eyelash inside a white envelope?” (“Who Were You?”). Challenging but never vexing, Gonzalez’s work invites the reader into a world made new with refined, sometimes absurd, but always well-chosen words.
This article appears in November 18 • 2005.