Vida and Other Poems
by Alma Luz Villanueva
0-930324-66-8 || Cost: $17.95
Paperback , 200 pages
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Critical Praise for Vida and Other Poems
Those of us who have followed Alma Luz Villanueva's career welcome her latest book, Vida. Villanueva makes extraordinary poetry out of the ordinary events of life, celebrating womanhood, love, and children without the need to tear down men. What a refreshing, positive view of life is in these poems. Villanueva loves life and writes its poetry and for that we are all the richer.
— Rudolfo Anaya
The poetry of Alma Villanueva, as with her prose, is drawn from the gut, her womb, and a vital point in an intelligent woman's mind. Of course, she always speaks from the heart. What she delivers to the reader are the offerings of a whole human being: ". . . utterly sad, utterly alive . . . so new and / so used, in / pleasure and in pain, singing. . . ." She sings, she rages, she lets us know that above all, the poet is a mirror to our own inner triumphs and failures.
— Ana Castillo
Amid all the soulless words written by technicians these days, what a deep relief to find yet another book by Alma Villanueva flowing and overflowing with the electric joy of Life. Vida shows us, poem by poem, how to live every moment open to the heartbeat, the love-beat of the world. Alma Villanueva's Vida is a diary of the healing dreams of a 21st century Shaman. Singing into the third millennium the songs of the Yaqui Grandmothers who taught her to listen to the spirits everywhere, the powerful voice of Alma Villanueva infuses the American Visionary tradition of Whitman and Neruda with woman's Energy for creation and compassion. Vida is a vast love poem to Life, a masterwork for a new millennium -- a gift that spirals out from its ancient roots to the stars, a gift from a fierce yet forgiving human heart, a gift of warm-blooded earth and the purest Light. Come, forget the technicians and feast your famished soul on this Joy.
— Janine Canan, author of Changing Woman
Alma Luz Villanueva calls our spirits out from the lonely places where they have wandered. Stunning, confident, playful, her words guide us back to this planet's beauty and the power of our own dreams. There, we can gather--one by one--as despair subsides, and we are "ever new."
— Leslie Simon, co-author with Jan Johnson Drantell of A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent
Reviews
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Those of us who have followed Alma Luz Villanueva's career welcome her latest book, Vida. Villanueva makes extraordinary poetry out of the ordinary events of life, celebrating womanhood, love, and children without the need to tear down men. What a refreshing, positive view of life is in these poems. Villanueva loves life and writes its poetry and for that we are all the richer. -- Rudolfo Anaya
The poetry of Alma Villanueva, as with her prose, is drawn from the gut, her womb, and a vital point in an intelligent woman's mind. Of course, she always speaks from the heart. What she delivers to the reader are the offerings of a whole human being: ". . . utterly sad, utterly alive . . . so new and / so used, in / pleasure and in pain, singing. . . ." She sings, she rages, she lets us know that above all, the poet is a mirror to our own inner triumphs and failures. -- Ana Castillo
Amid all the soulless words written by technicians these days, what a deep relief to find yet another book by Alma Villanueva flowing and overflowing with the electric joy of Life. Vida shows us, poem by poem, how to live every moment open to the heartbeat, the love-beat of the world. Alma Villanueva's Vida is a diary of the healing dreams of a 21st century Shaman. Singing into the third millennium the songs of the Yaqui Grandmothers who taught her to listen to the spirits everywhere, the powerful voice of Alma Villanueva infuses the American Visionary tradition of Whitman and Neruda with woman's Energy for creation and compassion. Vida is a vast love poem to Life, a masterwork for a new millennium -- a gift that spirals out from its ancient roots to the stars, a gift from a fierce yet forgiving human heart, a gift of warm-blooded earth and the purest Light. Come, forget the technicians and feast your famished soul on this Joy. -- Janine Canan, author of Changing Woman
Alma Luz Villanueva calls our spirits out from the lonely places where they have wandered. Stunning, confident, playful, her words guide us back to this planet's beauty and the power of our own dreams. There, we can gather--one by one--as despair subsides, and we are "ever new." -- Leslie Simon, co-author with Jan Johnson Drantell of A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent
From the El Paso Times, April 20, 2003: Review by Rigoberto Gonzalez
In her essay "Some Notes on the Organic Form," the late poet Denise Levertov stated: "A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing over them and landing on the other side -- that's ecstasy."
This spiritual transcendence is just one of the many discoveries in Alma Luz Villanueva's recent collection of poetry, Vida, a book worthy of that title because it's a celebration of life, its magnificent origins and deeply personal ends.
Villanueva's body of work sponsors the notion of a universal community, in which the citizens of the earth, the primordial home, must act as caretakers for each other. The speaker, in a Whitmanesque voice, declares:
I am the ancestor of my self and millions, yes, millions --my family of strangers, we birth our selves century after century.
An identification with community, however, is not a simplistic process as evidenced by the "Dear World" sequence. Comprising seven sobering letters addressed to the Earth, each epistle is an accounting for the humanistic attitudes that have neglected the natural wonders and generated a history of damage. The speaker references such atrocities as the Matthew Shepard murder and the shootings in Columbine, but the tone commands wisdom, not outrage, as the speaker attempts to reconcile herself to her human family:
I wish for my people (and myself) ... to know the myths of our planet, to eat her ripe, sweet fruits, to hear her heart speaking.
In Villanueva's poetics, life is transformation, whether it's enlightenment attained through the kindred animal spirit -- the nagualism in Amerindian culture, which leads to an appreciation of the animal self and nature -- or whether it's the understanding of life as a significant part of a lengthier journey, as in the title poem, one of many tender elegies:
My aunt sinks into her own bones, working hard to find her way to the center of the Earth, to the center of her Self.
Preoccupied with reinscribing nature into poetry, Villanueva populates the pages with figurative and literal animal imagery, from the "Fox of Childhood" and "Dreaming Bear" to the diverse aviary -- eagles, egrets, crows, owls and the poised pelican.
Sacred symbolism informs the work, in homage to the poet's Yaqui lineage. But Villanueva isn't espousing a return to preindustrial times or even militant conservationism, since her creative space moves as easily through the streets of polluted San Francisco as it does through the pristine expanse of rural skies. The cacophony of these co-existing landscapes is its own kind of music, and Villanueva's poetry is a plea to make peace with this age as the world changes.
The poem "Pollen" attempts a gesture of harmony in a small, but meaningful moment:
The sunflowers on the table rained yellow yellow pollen on the faces of my ancestors: Frida Kahlo. Federico Garca Lorca. Their faces on my books. They stare at me.
Indeed, Villanueva's own book is fertile territory, rich and blossoming with her distinctive voice and essential vision.
Rigoberto González is the author of the poetry collection So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks, and of Crossing Vines, a novel forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and may be reached at Rigoberto70@aol.com
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El Paso TimesApril 20, 2003
In her essay "Some Notes on the Organic Form," the late poet Denise Levertov stated: "A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing over them and landing on the other side -- that's ecstasy."
This spiritual transcendence is just one of the many discoveries in Alma Luz Villanueva's recent collection of poetry, Vida, a book worthy of that title because it's a celebration of life, its magnificent origins and deeply personal ends.
Villanueva's body of work sponsors the notion of a universal community, in which the citizens of the earth, the primordial home, must act as caretakers for each other. The speaker, in a Whitmanesque voice, declares:
I am the ancestor of my self and millions, yes, millions --my family of strangers, we birth our selves century after century.
An identification with community, however, is not a simplistic process as evidenced by the "Dear World" sequence. Comprising seven sobering letters addressed to the Earth, each epistle is an accounting for the humanistic attitudes that have neglected the natural wonders and generated a history of damage. The speaker references such atrocities as the Matthew Shepard murder and the shootings in Columbine, but the tone commands wisdom, not outrage, as the speaker attempts to reconcile herself to her human family:
I wish for my people (and myself) ... to know the myths of our planet, to eat her ripe, sweet fruits, to hear her heart speaking.
In Villanueva's poetics, life is transformation, whether it's enlightenment attained through the kindred animal spirit -- the nagualism in Amerindian culture, which leads to an appreciation of the animal self and nature -- or whether it's the understanding of life as a significant part of a lengthier journey, as in the title poem, one of many tender elegies:
My aunt sinks into her own bones, working hard to find her way to the center of the Earth, to the center of her Self.
Preoccupied with reinscribing nature into poetry, Villanueva populates the pages with figurative and literal animal imagery, from the "Fox of Childhood" and "Dreaming Bear" to the diverse aviary -- eagles, egrets, crows, owls and the poised pelican.
Sacred symbolism informs the work, in homage to the poet's Yaqui lineage. But Villanueva isn't espousing a return to preindustrial times or even militant conservationism, since her creative space moves as easily through the streets of polluted San Francisco as it does through the pristine expanse of rural skies. The cacophony of these co-existing landscapes is its own kind of music, and Villanueva's poetry is a plea to make peace with this age as the world changes.
The poem "Pollen" attempts a gesture of harmony in a small, but meaningful moment:
The sunflowers on the table rained yellow yellow pollen on the faces of my ancestors: Frida Kahlo. Federico Garca Lorca. Their faces on my books. They stare at me.
Indeed, Villanueva's own book is fertile territory, rich and blossoming with her distinctive voice and essential vision.
About This Author
Read more about Alma Luz Villanueva HERE.
