DISCOVERIES

THE UNDERGROUND HEART

A Return to a Hidden Landscape

By Ray Gonzalez

University of Arizona Press:

170 pp., $35

You don’t have to understand everything you read. There are many wonderful moments in literature when an author for a moment loses sight of his audience. Perhaps only a handful of people will understand what he is thinking in those moments.

Here is Ray Gonzalez, career memoirist and poet, going back again to the land where he was born 50 years ago in El Paso: “[S]hooting down a risky highway where Colorado is saying good-bye, New Mexico is welcoming me with black rain clouds in magnetic fields, and the Allman Brothers are in heart-attack mode.”

“Home is the generation of longing,” he writes, but “The Underground Heart,” his account of life in the Southwest, is more ironic than nostalgic. Gonzalez is bitter about the rising border tourism that romanticizes certain aspects (tequila, Pancho Villa) while ignoring decrepitude and hostility toward immigrants. The Southwest, he writes, noticing trucks crossing the border with America’s toxic waste, is the most “nuclear-polluted” part of the country. There is this aspect of the book; then there is the poet, responding on a cellular level to a biological call to the desert. He thinks about death and regeneration in the desert and dives far into his own subconscious, where I can no longer follow him: “[The] desert delivers reality, then takes it away from the love of family and the love of history that has grown from the stories of families in the desert.”

These essays give a reader the feeling of walking home in Gonzalez’s footsteps. We can sense the neon light in the desert, the nuclear waste underneath the ocotillo, but we don’t quite know what that means to him. And that’s just fine. Maybe someday we will.

*

AFTER NATURE

By W.G. Sebald

Random House: 124 pp., $21.95

“Our brains, after all, / are always at work on some quivers / of self-organization, however faint, / and it is from this that an order / arises, in places beautiful / and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance.”

These lines, from the autobiographical third prose poem in this triptych, contain the organizing principle of the three poems in “After Nature.” The first is about the 16th century painter Matthias Grunewald, the second about the 19th century botanist Georg Steller. The scientist, the artist and the writer all trying to make sense of life and death, pulled between images of white snow in the Alps and green forests and pastures. The late W.G. Sebald is a writer who often stops, in his quest for meaning, with the unexplained coincidence. He will not translate that coincidence for his readers, and this is the secret of his perfect timing. Here is the other secret: We are willing to be carried along in a haze of not quite understanding because Sebald also revels in the pure music of words: “claret,” “lungwort,” “finial,” “Pentecost,” “glutinous” and “vapor” are just a few.

Only by suspending readerly willfulness will you be able to float weightless through his writing. The reward? “Darkness even at noon and / luminaries absent from heaven,” “Moss roses / grow on the Alps. Avignon sylvan. / Across the Gotthard a horse gropes its way,” “The potted plants have had a way of / keeping things to themselves,” “When morning sets in, / the coolness of night / moves out into the plumage / of fishes.” Now, isn’t that enough?

*

THE ART OF SETTING STONES

And Other Writings From the Japanese Garden

By Marc Peter Keane

Stone Bridge Press: 156 pp., $16.95

“The Art of Setting Stones” is an example of a lovely book hampered by the author’s desire to explain too much. One of the hardest things to hide in literature is self-consciousness; too much explanation is a symptom of self-consciousness.

These essays describe places in and around Kyoto, Japan, that inspired Marc Peter Keane. He interprets nature, reveals its metaphors and meanings explicitly, the way the Japanese do implicitly. “A flower herself,” he writes of a little girl inspecting lotus flowers in a pond, “a perfect blossom aged four or five. Has she risen so quickly from the muck? Or, do we all begin as pure, only to fall at some point, lodge firmly in the mire, and need to work our way out again?”

Every flower, every tree, every stone, is a jumping-off point for a similar meditation. “In ancient times,” he explains, “all of nature was perceived as animate ... people of that time were attuned to the intricacies of nature, able through that intimacy to gain knowledge pertinent to their lives.” Keane’s method, rather than re-creating the nature he admires and finds meaning in for the reader, re-creates instead his own consciousness. He re-creates the mirror that he looks into, and it is calm, but flat.