Review by Wayne Sheldrake
Poetry – May 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
colcha
by Aaron Abeyta”
Published in 2002 University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0-87081-615-2
COLCHA NEEDS NO DUST JACKET. This collection is already covered with the authentic dust of dying grass, cedar fence post, empty ditches, alfalfa fields, low-riding Monte Carlos, tired Ford pickups, and the rutted roads in and around the small southern Colorado town of Antonito where Abeyta was born, grew up, and worked.
Abeyta knows the spring of a tractor seat, the heft of hay bails, the irrigating pull of the Conejos River, the instincts of cows, and the magic movement of sheep, but he’s not a cowboy poet by any means. Rather, he brings Neruda, Lorca, and Whitman to the campfire, intertwining English and Spanish in stories that urge us to understand a small, old high-desert town with a durable, close-knit culture.
Abeyta writes about family, friends, and famous (and infamous) locals. His approach is intimate and daring while avoiding the self-absorbed, coffee-house clichés we fear. Yes, death plays a role in the connection of community and the land, but these poems are sly rather than dark, modulated rather than graphic, sweet rather than maudlin.
Abeyta is often humorous. In poems like “zoot suit jesus,” “thirteen ways of looking at a tortilla,” “santa fe girl,” “instructions on how to write a pinche suicide note,” “mixed metaphor,” and even the astringent “december 20th,” he goes for the laugh and gets it.
If death is a horse that “ran so fast…only its tail got wet,” then Abeyta grabs that palomina by the mane and allows us to slip on her bare back and feel the deep, hot breathing of emotion, “the second most true thing on earth.”
“Nothing is myth,” he promises, as he leads us across the llano, toward the truest things on earth — the land and community and family.
–Wayne Sheldrake
