I’m engaged to
New Mexico. I’ve been engaged for eighteen years.
I’ve worn its ring of rainbow set with a mica
shard.
I’ve given my dowry already, my skin
texture, my hair moisture.
I’ve given New Mexico my
back-East manners, my eyesight,
The arches of my feet.
New Mexico’s a difficult fiancé.
—excerpt from “Something Like Marriage” by Joan Logghe
The editors of a new book,
In Company, hope to reveal New Mexico’s
poets to the rest of the world, while at the same time uniting the
disparate communities of poets within the state. As editor Lee
Bartlett writes in the introduction, “(A)ll too often writers in
Santa Fe or Taos seem willfully oblivious to much of the scene in
Albuquerque, and poets in Albuquerque seem intent on returning the
favor. It goes without saying, we suppose, that poets in all these
areas generally seem to work hard at being equally oblivious to
what is happening with poets in Las Cruces, or Silver City, or
Roswell, or on ‘the Rez.’ ”
The poems
collected here run the gamut of history and culture: Rudolfo Anaya
rewrites the Egyptian tale of Isis and Osiris to take place in the
Jemez Mountains; Simon Ortiz relates how power lines and railroads
raced across Indian Country; Bobby Byrd tells how he “slipped down
to Bobby Favela’s house and shot him in the side of the head
with a poem.”
From N. Scott Momaday, one of the
state’s most recognizable American Indian voices, to Lisa
Gill, a diva of the Albuquerque slam scene, the book showcases
those whose voices rise in stanzas from red dirt, crystalline skies
and hoodoos in the badlands. Anyone who has greeted desert rain
knows exactly what Joy Harjo means in her poem “Rainy Dawn”: That
day so hot, heat danced in waves off / bright car tops, we both
stood poised at that door from the east, listened / for a long time
to the sound of our grandmothers’ voices, the brushing / wind
of sacred wings, the rattle of raindrops in dry gourds.
Whether you’re a native or an interloper, the voices in this
volume will make you feel at home.
In Company:
An Anthology of New Mexico Poets after 1960
Edited by Lee Bartlett, V.B. Price and Dianne Edenfield
Edwards
542 pages, hardcover $34.95.
University
of New Mexico Press, 2004.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Forty-four years of poetry from the Land of Enchantment.
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