Cabato Sentora

""The confessor/ with his metal cross,"" a ""Woman with Seven Iguanas on Her Head"" (""She is married to the Lizard Man"") and the poet of this fourth collection all inhabit an apocalyptic border landscape, weighted with with foreboding Catholic iconography (""The bloody Christ on the wall is folding his hands...""), Yaqui symbolism and unrelenting poverty. Poems like ""The Angels of Juarez, Mexico"" and ""The Poor Angel"" summon a rhetoric of witness without clear hope of salvation: ""I came from El Paso, from the border of angry bees/ and brown dogs who stick their torn snouts into the river./ I came from the border of twisted wire/ and pregnant women floating in the water."" Gonzalez is a noted anthologist (Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance), and the speaker of these poems collects and holds together wrenching images of his land and people--images that he remains wary of summing up, or even offering to us: ""I can't speak without removing that blue throat from my body,/ can't introduce you to Llaga without asking you to remove/ your voice so I can examine it."" If many of Gonzalez's metaphors are overwhelmed by the spiritual and material conditions they describe, it is not for lack of his leaving ""one or two/ twigs of prayer lying on the dirt floor"" of this impassioned collection. (Jan.)