Turtle Pictures

Once an ""accessible"" poet, Gonzalez seems to be moving away from poems where a snake is a snake, and the desert wind a force of stark desiccation. The author of five books of poetry (From the Restless Roots; Twilights and Chants etc.), and the editor of several anthologies, Gonzalez here enters an abstracted terra incognita, ""inside the canyon of time and disturbed thoughts,"" that proves a fruitful hunting ground for the poet, yielding a poetic sequence of temporally layered images drawn from indigenous creation myths. Divided into a first, second, and third ""Shell,"" interspersed with ""tortuga"" (turtle) poems, Gonzalez has collaged together verse, bits of historical commentary, short fiction and prose poems. The work gradually moves toward a mythopolitical statement proclaiming that the time has come for Chicanos to return to their Aztec roots. Surreal images (""When the song enters, I escape from the grip of color"") acquire a sort of accretive meaning, yet the whole does not quite come together convincingly. Nevertheless, Gonzalez's phantasmagoric bricolage of mythic Native American roots and political Chicano branches is often suggestive and inspiring. (Feb.)