Review by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Poetry – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
as orion falls
by Aaron A. AbeytaPublished in 2005 by Ghost Road Press
ISBN 0976072971
AARON A. ABEYTA’S first collection, Colcha, won literary prizes, and his new volume, as orion falls, seems certain to win not only prizes but also critical recognition for his rare voice. Abeyta’s roots are in southern Colorado near Mogote, a short distance west of Antonito in Conejos County, where poverty is a counterpoint to the riches of the Spanish-speaking heritage. Abeyta’s poems express his profound love for this community, the families, their ethic, and the landscape with which their lives are intertwined — without glossing over their losses and failures. There is neither sentimentality nor judgment here, rather dignity, respect, and empathy.
In addition to the forty-some poems in this volume, several of which are addressed conversationally to specific individuals, Abeyta has included two letters to George Sibley, who is well-known to readers of Colorado Central. One of these letters was read by Abeyta at the 2001 Headwaters Conference” at Western State College and was later printed in this magazine. In it, Abeyta observes that he repeatedly returns “in some innate migration to the llanos, mountains, churches and rivers that form my home.” This habit is no accident since “my people came to my valley home and lands of new mexico 400 years ago and have been stealing or stolen from ever since.”
He explains that “we make each place our own by the things we return to it, living or remembered.”
In the second letter to George Sibley, in response to a question from Sibley about the idea of sovereignty, Abeyta presents an example of a sovereign man, his neighbor Gerald Arellano, who lived ¼ mile down the road: “a thin man, almost non-existent, his tall brown body racked with diabetes, alcoholism, drug abuse.” Living in an uninsulated trailer with no running water, surviving on his welfare check, Arellano was “not an example of supreme excellence.” He “died of his failings a few years back.” But “on the conejos he was free, autonomous, memorable, totally aware that some gifts cannot be purchased, stolen, neglected or lost.”
The setting is regional, the tone is affectionate, but these poems do not convey the simple nostalgia which the gentry might expect. In this collection, Abeyta includes some poems that reveal bitterness about the loss of land to competing newcomers. He also communicates his sense of kinship with an unknown migrant who is assigned the name Jose Molina in a poem entitled “for the unidentified Mexican national who died at 5:00 p.m. somewhere between san luis and manassa his van rolling 3¼ times.” Abeyta writes in part:
tonight Jose Molina you are all that we deny
the green fields of the gringos as Antonito burns
the dry Conejos
the broken winged birds….
Jose Molina who came to this county
one of fifty-five lying flat
shoulder to shoulder beneath the false floor of a semi….
Jose Molina I have seen you before
your silhouetted body facing east
in the door frame of your trailer on a winter morning
trying to become warm
become american….
Such unforgettable imagery permeates Abeyta’s poetry, whether he is longing for his abuelita (his grandmother) who once chastened him “with only a stiff finger to the chest,” or remembering the sounds of his grieving wife’s “fingers searching through sheet music in a wooden piano bench” as her healing began, or recalling a:
leaking roof
into old coffee can
at rear of the church
tin metronome
to a sermon on the devil
which is not
loud enough
to overcome the rain
The possessor of a graduate degree from Colorado State University and an associate professor of English at Adams State College in Alamosa (he includes a poem to his class with the salutation “dear minion”), Abeyta has a solid academic foundation. Reviewers have attempted to equate him with writers like Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, and even the bombastic Walt Whitman, whereas I place him with the late regional poet Jim Segal of Española and the prose writer Frank Waters of Arroyo Seco, both of northern New Mexico.
But Abeyta should not be mistaken for a regional poet with only local appeal, for his powerful work strikes like a knife, cutting deep through a wide spectrum of human experience and emotions. Aaron Abeyta exposes heart, sinew, and bone, often his own.
This volume is available in both hardcover and paperback. No bookshelf should be without a copy.