Elegies in Blue

"To write well about your life, you need to have a life worth writing about. On that score, Saenz, a son of the Rio Grande border, hits pay dirt. At that border, poverty meets wealth more starkly than anywhere else except, perhaps, at Israel's fences between Jews and Palestinians. When a writer there speaks of himself, he can speak of his people and how the border defines them. That Saenz does in verse and prose poems distinguished by simple mellifluousness, clear imagery, and effortless balancing of the oracular and the personal voices.He writes of a boy asking important questions, loving the names in books, and figuring out why his father quit drinking (for love, though love makes nothing easy), and that boy is more imaginably him than the first-person speaker in other poems, an 'I' that includes every border native who knows why the subjects of the book's many elegies--figures ranging from Denise Levertov to Cesar Chavez to Maria de Guadalupe Cenizeros, 'citizen of Smeltertown'--are important to their identity."

"ELEGIES IN BLUE is a remarkable selection of free-verse poetry that transcribes the author's life experience of learning, absorbing history, growing, experiencing joy, and suffering terrible loss. Creating poetry akin to elegies in that it praises the lives of those who helped the author find the right words, ELEGIES IN BLUE is a book of memorable, dynamic verse."

"To date, Sáenz has split his literary career almost in half between prose and poetry. The latest addition to his corpus melds the two genres into two dozen poems largely composed in prose. Liberally expanding the application of the term elegy, Sáenz casts a tone of lament, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, over most of the subject matter--childhood, innocence, family, life, death. This mood culminates in the ubi sunt ('where are') motif in the poem 'At the Grave of the Twentieth Century,' which pays homage at the graves of the likes of Karl Marx, JFK, the poet's father-in-law, and his grandfather.Thematically perpetuating his preoccupation with politics and ardently defending the Mexican American border community of which he is an integral part, these poems are drenched in much firmer reality and overlaid with more indignation than his recent novel Carry Me Like Water. Recommended especially for public libraries serving Mexican American populations, who will relate to the themes of restlessness and alienation."

Two new books by former Las Cruceans offer moving and poetic views of life. Both books offer treats for those who love words . . . and writers who can skillfully put them to use to explore the mysteries and meanings of life's journeys.In "Elegies in blue: Poems" (by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Cinco Puntos Press, paperback, $13.95), Las Cruces native Sáenz writes eloquently about everything from coming of age to life's profound passages and the psychic battle scars of war. Sáenz, who won the American Book Award for his first collection of poems "Calendar of Dust," is a former Catholic priest and is currently an English professor at UTEP.In the poems and essays of "Elegies," he roams through memories of Border life and major historical events like a kind of poetic archaeologist. "I wander the ground of this decaying earth. Like a historian, I am not another tourist. But what is a historian if not a tourist who gathers graves and facts and orders them," he asks in "The Rags of Times on Rio Vista Farm (or A Short History of Clothes).""At the Graves of the Twentieth Century" offers a series of ruminations at the graves of Karl Marx, John F. Kennedy, Pancho Villa, David Macias, and "Grandpo" Juan Lucero Sáenz, ending with dark ruminations at the grave of the century itself: ". . . they might have buried you, here, in El Paso/Juárez, dumping ground of the Americas. Not that you would have known any rest here. Peace is not in great abundance on the border."