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Eyes to See Otherwise, by Homero Aridjis

Jeffery Beam

Eyes to See Otherwise / Ojos de Otro Mirar: Selected Poems. Homero Aridjis. New Directions, 2001. 312 pages, $19.95 (paperback). ISBN: 0811215091

Aridjis, Mexico's most important poet since Paz, has been lauded internationally not only for the lyrical beauty of his poems, but also for his environmental activism. Gathering hundreds of poems from the 1960s to the present, Eyes to See demonstrates Aridjis's development from a simple poet of love ("Cirabel / I always come to your rooms / with a confusion of mouths") to a poet who celebrates his indigenous beginnings and the natural environment which continues to nourish his soul: "Time swings through the green tresses of the willows, / in the West a mockingbird is echoing loudly, / the landscape comes alive, the past moves." ("View of Mexico City from Chapultepec, Circa 1825")

Instrumental in protecting the monarch butterfly (whose migration path ends at his birthplace) and the gray whale, Aridjis's poetry reflects his native landscape. One feels his oneness with it—his body being landscape too:

AND BEING of the substance of the mystery
our being opens its eyes
to see the sacred immensity

space
enters our soul
at the moment we see it

while the sun
sends its rays out
over the obstinate clouds of the ephemeral

and my hand
makes a sign in the air
moved by this whole being

                        (from "Exaltation of Light")

To read Aridjis, as with many Latin American and Spanish poets, is to recognize poetry's ability to vibrantly evoke the timeless dawning of consciousness and Nature's eternal newness.