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Each Month I Sing

by L. Luis Lopez

By John Nizalowski

Found in: | Inside | Books |

Occasionally, justice prevails in the capricious world of literary endeavor.

For years, Colorado author L. Luis Lopez has been quietly producing poetry possessing grace, humor, and compassion.

His first book, Musings of a Barrio Sack Boy, recalled Lopez's childhood on Albuquerque's south side. Filled with tender descriptions of people and places long since vanished, this book has sold numerous printings and is right up there with Leo Romero's Celso and Jimmy Santiago Baca's Martin as a superb poetic depiction of New Mexican life.

Lopez's next book, A Painting of Sand, is a lyric portrait of Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch ? their history, geography, flora, and fauna. It too has a strong following, and has been twice reprinted.

Still, despite the relative success of these books, Lopez's work seemed destined to remain within a small circle of loyal readers in Colorado and New Mexico.

This all may change with the recently published, Each Month I Sing, which combines Lopez's classical scholarship with rich imagery gained from a long life deeply lived. I believe it is his best book, an opinion perhaps confirmed by its receiving an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, a prize that will surely bring attention to Lopez's poetry beyond his native Southwest.

Each Month I Sing celebrates the calendar round with 156 poems - 13 poems for each month. The first poem of each chapter is an overview of the month, the second about the month's name, the third its gem, the fourth its flower, the fifth its zodiacal sign, the sixth a famous writer born during the month, and the seventh a painter. The remaining six poems are, as Lopez states in the preface, "my own observations about and my experiences with the month."

So, for instance, the section on November, after the overview poem, opens with a piece about November being born from the "witches, devils, and skeletons" of Halloween. Next follow poems on topaz, chrysanthemums, Scorpio, William Blake, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The section finishes with poems about Noah, Cortez, Lopez's futile attempt to prune his book collection, the moon shining through a tree's bare branches, noise in a library, and a homeless man with a cardboard cell phone.

Thus Lopez gives us twelve engaging chapters that merge his extensive classical learning with his eye for humorous and sublime details. In Each Month I Sing, one can find everything from a meditation on Janus, the Roman god of duality for whom January is named, to JUCO, the world series of junior college baseball.

One of book's attractions arises from Lopez's abundant use of mythological references. In "A Sonnet for Aquarius," Zeus destroys the world with a great flood because he is badly treated when traveling the world in disguise. "Four A.M." depicts a vision in the moonlit sky of Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world, brought on by three wolves: Skoll, Hati, and Fenrir. The story of the Greek warrior Ajax, whose blood gave birth to a flower, is the basis for the poem "Larkspur."

The book's pieces on art are quite strong as well. There is "Van Gogh's Starry Night," which captures the painting's complex textures: "The long brown swirls / from brush / that gentle touch the blue / and yellow / swirls / that are the starry night / are the cedars / nature / unlike the sharp steeple / in the village / brushed / into / the swirling sky." "Picasso as a Baby" commemorates Picasso's first words ? "piz, piz," short for lapiz, the Spanish word for pencil ? uttered so the young artist could draw whirls to represent sugar cakes. And then there is the charming "Campbell's Soup: a Villanelle for Andy Warhol" that captures the relationship between art, a mother's love, and an abundance of soup.

Still, two of the finest pieces in Each Month I Sing are poems for writers. "Salvador Quintana," which is dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is a poignant tale of loss and self-destructive drunkenness. And then there is the utterly brilliant "Encounter with La Llorona Upon His Return from Harvard," dedicated to Virgil, in which Lopez transforms an encounter on the Rio Grande with the folkloric spirit-woman who wails for her dead children into a passage from the Aenead: "like an Aeneas / he stands / at the edge of Tartaros / expecting to see Chiron / standing silently / in his boat beckoning to those / who would cross / holding / his boney hand out / for the penny . . . . / he tried to turn / and run from that place / but too late / for a mist spiraled / from the river's surface / an El Greco figure / elongating towards the moon / clouding it / becoming the face of a woman / in pain hollowed eyes / and wailing mouth."

So venture forth, track down Each Month I Sing, and celebrate not only the year's cycle with the book's many superb poems, but also the triumph of a beloved regional poet.

John Nizalowski teaches creative writing at Mesa State College and is the author of Hooking the Sun.