Tiempos Lejanos: Poetic Images from the Past (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series) (English and Spanish Edition)

For Nasario García, poetry comprises his personal images of the past. The poems in this book, presented in Spanish and English, take us back to the village of Ojo del Padre, now called Guadalupe, New Mexico, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when such villages were about to leap from the preindustrial era into a postindustrial world. García grew up in Ojo del Padre and ably captures the landscape, the village and its people, the birds and animals, both domestic and wild, just before they are extinguished forever.

These poems are deceptively simple. While maintaining the viewpoint of a child, García employs sophisticated rhymes and techniques and suffuses the poems with a rich humor. His work links ancient Spanish literary forms with the vernacular language of the village to produce a profoundly authentic New Mexican rural Spanish.

Because these are poems about everyday things, they have a universal appeal. Simple items--a coffee pot, a teakettle--come lyrically to life like a child's wind-up toy.