Soul Over Lightning

by Ray Gonzalez

Overview

In this collection, which the poet calls his “rebirth in the search for home,” Ray Gonzalez expresses the gentle, humble intelligence that has made him a leading voice in Latino letters. He shares with the reader the voice of a soul searcher who has passed through middle age and still vibrates with passion for the world.

Gonzalez shows his profound respect for other people, species, places, elements, and histories. Illusions to religious imagery knock against those of the natural world—feathers and rocks—creating a complex tableau of objects and feelings. Employing the image-driven approach for which he is renowned, in this collection Gonzalez is taut, using poetics that are fully formed. Even as the poems weave together highly intellectual, refined subject matter, the language remains accessible. 

The book is divided into three parts. The first section offers Gonzalez’s most personal work yet, meditating on aging, forgetting, and the reader. The next section is more outward looking, as Gonzalez takes on great artists from both Old World and New World traditions. Finally, in the last section, Gonzalez opens himself up, reflecting in very personal ways on the everyday, such as a return from a hospital stay or a visit to the doctor.

Soul Over Lightning weaves together elements of Native American and Chicano/a narratives, inspired by the landscape of the desert Southwest and the experience of living on the border. It offers a new supernarrative that lifts spirits and yet remains grounded in a timeless search for home and truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816598748
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	09/25/2014
Series:	Camino del Sol
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	464 KB

About the Author

Ray Gonzalez is the author of fourteen books and also has edited more than a dozen anthologies of poetry and fiction. He is the recipient of the Carr P. Collins/Texas Institute of Letters Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the Latino Heritage Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He is a professor of literature at the University of Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Part One I Slept in a Cave The Bird Du Fu in Early Winter Vertigo Comfort The Road The Miracle Drawing the Owl Notebook Several Beliefs Strength at Aguirre Springs, New Mexico The White Hair The Secret Book of Sand Amarma For the Convenience of the Reader Part Two West of West Eyes of a Saint Defend the Day Gluing Photographs of the PetroglyphsInto My Scrapbook Staring at Rodin I Stepped on the Head of Man Ray The Face of the Beggar Memory House Dark Star Origin A Made Place That Is Mine They Cesar Vallejo and the Mule South Past Albuquerque, Guided by Rain The Distance Between Two Rooms The Second Miracle The Ghost at San Elizario, Texas Is This It? Blame Family of Water At the Time of the Armistice Joseph Cornell’s Diary Entry One Day After I Was Born, September 21, 1952 Part Three After Reading Octavio Paz The Clay Jars The Mathematics of Ecstasy Max Jacob’s Shoes The Third Miracle The Owl Murmur Somewhere North of Las Cruces Keep The Flat Desert Your Hands Save Twilight He Calls His Dog Rimbaud Rufino Tamayo Invisible The Fourth Miracle Hollow Ground The Poet at the Tree Beautiful Balata Soul Over Lightning

Editorial Reviews

A prolific author of numerous genres, including essays, memoir, and poetry, Gonzalez brings vibrant imagery and aesthetic allusions to his thirteenth poetry collection, a rekindling of the poet’s quest to find home, located somewhere between his birthplace of El Paso and his adopted metropolis of Minneapolis.”—Booklist

“Soul Over Lightning is a spiritual exploration of the Earth and of the human mind. It is a carving into the wood of Ray Gonzalez’s commitment to language, poetry and his roots.”—Puerto Del Sol

“There's a restraint here, a lyrical sparseness that leans toward a meditational Zen-like medicine of a high order.”—Timothy Liu, author of Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse

“Set largely in the desert Southwest of his birth, Soul Over Lightning builds on Ray Gonzalez’s impressive career of attention to the reciprocal relationship of people and place. For over thirty years, he’s been at the forefront of this necessary investigation, and he continues to find new and fresh insights into our most fundamental and true selves. These poems range across artistic and personal touchstones; Rodin and Dalí share the endeavor with Man Ray and Charles Mingus, lyric turns to prose and back, and everywhere meaning comes as a solitary arrival, with ‘the coiled earth climbing into your heart / to welcome you home.’”—John Gallaher, author of In a Landscape

“In Soul Over Lightning, Ray Gonzalez reveals his unique genius for inhabiting the world of myth and symbol, so completely that words like ‘myth’ and ‘symbol’ start to feel extraneous. I mean that these are poems of the highest intensity, poems in which a lyric speaker both mourns and praises, but always balances deep feeling with expertly artful lines and sentences. ‘Let us imagine our hands reach,’ reads the first line of Gonzalez’s title poem, and that line holds true: again and again, this poet leads his reader into new and powerful depths of thought and feeling, terrain that proves both originally imagined and startlingly real. Ray Gonzalez remains a major poet, and this is his best book.”—Peter Campion, author of El Dorado

“This is a contemplative collection of poetry, a delving into the sacred, spiritual aspects and ideas of who we are.”—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Mañana Means Heaven

From the Publisher

10/15/2014
The award-winning Gonzalez (The Ghost of John Wayne) writes poetry suffused with religious allusions, and his latest work is also replete with repetition and references to the Southwest. The story line suggests a journey in which the narrator observes nature and its creatures, from sand to stars to owls to dogs. As he observes, he remembers his past encounters with these aspects of nature—some of which seem miraculous. Indeed, this book is held together by four poems titled "The Miracle" and "The Second Miracle," and so forth, with each poem alluding to the birth and rebirth of a totemic character—suggesting, perhaps, the poet's own spiritual growth. VERDICT The most well crafted of these poems are written from the inside out and tend to move through surreal imagery to arrive at an ending that feels just right, as in this ending for the title poem: "and we lie in the rain and lie inside it." But too often there is a heaviness to this collection particularly evident when the observer imposes his own agenda on the mystery of the poem and sees (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens) as he wills, not as the object is.—C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD

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