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."