Cayetana
by Frances Treviño
0-916727-34-3 || 978-0-916727-34-5 Cost: $16.00
Paperback Original , 90 pages
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Frances Treviño Santos reads her poem, "This Desire," to her husband, John Phillip Santos, at their wedding.
Critical Praise for Cayetana
Frances Treviño's second collection of poetry, Cayetana, is a luminous love song to unforgettable loves: from cities humid with the scent of passionate loves to zarzamora dreams of grandmothers, mothers. Hers is a strong and merciful voice that channels the precious Canto Hondo of the human heart.
— Denise Chávez, author of Loving Pedro Infante and A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture
- A zarzamora voice of lyrical lace and lean smoldering "through this mess of streets so familiar" — a poetry that hides behind no veils and keeps to no code. With this second collection of siren calls and lone star declarations, Frances Treviño establishes herself as a poet to watch.
— Lorna Dee Cervantes, University of Colorado, author of Drive: The First Quartet
Reviews
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Poets recall Zarzamora St. and beyond
San Antonio Express-NewsFeb. 25, 2007
Reviewed by John Hammond
As if to sound the first notes of spring, Wings Press of San Antonio has published the poetry of two of this city's finest writers, John Phillip Santos and Frances Treviño.
Best known for his lyrical family memoir Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (National Book Award finalist and selected for the city's inaugural "1 Book 1 San Antonio" reading program), Santos now gives us a fine first book of poetry, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer. Cayetana is Frances Trevino's third book; her The Laughter of Doves won the Premio Poesía Tejana Award.
Santos' poems honor the past, as in "Zarzamora Street," as he wakes to the memory of neighborhood sounds, "the crow-kaw/ and the mumbling blues of a black/ woman visiting on my street," and ends with this credo: "All that we count best/ in our lives has a shape, and will/ remain itself 'til we die/ and ourselves are no longer ourselves."
He finds this shape in the poignant "For a Death in the Family": "Some of them went as anyone might: with time,/ and others by water, a joke in the heart, a machine Fermina Ferguson, the white one, a spoon in her coffee Rene Santos, who is among the war dead And remember Cristobal, who took his truck into clear air."
"For the Traveler" concerns the dislocations of travelers, immigrants and spiritual refugees -- "my sisters and quiet brothers who weep/ are as homeless as I." Similarly, "Letter from England" (when Santos was a Rhodes Scholar), describes disconnects of weather, "Rain again, the sun dial in the garden is useless," and politics -- "How we install our territory of necessary lies/ and mark it off jagged as a mountain border/ from all these outward things,/ the inaugurals, laws, and decapitations."
Frances Treviño's poems are sensual, musical and personal. She, too, writes of "Zarzamora Street" -- "A part of town so bittersweet,/ with cars steaming, radios screaming Stucco shops of brooms and mops,/ imports and exports of Christ on the cross," and small scenes that appear "On Main Avenue" -- where the delicatessen's "silver hot boxes" roll downtown and "Mr. Ramirez/ grabs seed/ from a sack/ and tosses grain/ like slow motion,/ one step back,/ sometimes a circle" to the pigeons.
A trip in 1961 with her mother to the "Mercado" is recounted in couplets, as mama bargains with vendors, "I'll give you a dollar for all the ones bruised,/ and he'd look at her, half insulted, half amused," and they return, "Mama, me, and the thick cotton sack./ Us, low and slow, in a rose Cadillac."
Treviño can also deliver a palpable narrative tension, as in "When Sirens Are Silent" ("In a fury he climbs through the/ only window I didn't bolt down./ I hear his steps through my new house") and the intimate "I Am Barely Breathing" ("September drizzles as/ you held me somewhere between/ my waist and my hips,/ somewhere in a garage between/ a garden and a neighbor's yard," hearing, "drops against the Virgin Mary/ standing silent in the grotto,/ pecans and branches falling to the ground").
Read Santos and Treviño, exceptional poets with their own distinctive eloquence.
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John Hammond is a San Antonio poet and critic. Recently retired, he was public relations director for San Antonio College.
About This Author
Read more about Frances Treviño HERE.
