As Orion Falls

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wayne sheldrake, February 20, 2007 (view all comments by wayne sheldrake)
THE UNFALLEN
Abeyta’s first collection, colcha, won an American Book Award. In it, the truth of family and community and culture spread over him like the land, the wind and the sky. It would be a mistake to make the same artistic assumptions about his new collection. In As Orion Falls, each poem is cast, like a net thrown at the night, stars slipping away.
There’s always a ghostly allure in Abeyta’s poetry. It achieves richness in plainness, and it over-arcs and under-creeps mandatory nods to death and love. This collection begins with a shadowy doubt. “What does a poem come from?” Abeyta asks. Perhaps something solid can be made from the right words positioned in the right place at the right time.
But he is not striving to capture something solid here. Words aren’t solid enough for the poet (not this time); in the right place at the right time and viewed from the proper aspect, they deliver magic. Abeyta is trying to do something much more difficult than solidify or memorialize. He is paying attention to the breath of life as it’s inhaled by souls—the souls closest to him. His gift is exhaling, taking the moment and making words into something—a mesh slipping over experience and emotion. The poet is so small and the weave of it is absurdly large, as limitlessness as a night in which we would all so easily fit between the stars. Yet his words keep breathing, always falling in the rhythm of seasons, constellations, night and day, past and present, birth and death.
Like a sunrise arriving as a tribute to the soon dead, there is nothing in these poems that is not both arriving and departing at the same time—mysterious, fleeting, and true. At the very moment of ascension, descent is imminent, like “the moment when the word becomes something.” Something. What is that something that makes a poem? Nearly eerie realism pervades Abeyta’s soliloquies. This seems to be how the clichés-at-large poets fear most—family, community, mythology, symbol—are transcended.
Narrative permeates the lyric of the collection, although the obviousness of plot is stripped for what matters—for the story of the soul. The reverence of interment and liturgical rhythm imbues the poems with a sense of story. Story is exactly what lifts the collection. The emotional fabric of it exceeds autobiography and elevates it to memoir. And if memoir is a string of moments dictated by memory and searching for meaning in each other, as the points of a constellation make a net of stars, then Abeyta has succeeded.
This collection proves that it is still poetry’s duty to tell the toughest stories—the personal tragedies that elevate the private to the mythical. Using words positioned in the right place at the right time, viewed from the proper aspect, As Orion Falls delivers hope.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780976072973

Publisher:

Ghost Road Press

Subject:

American - Hispanic American

Author:

Abeyta, Aaron A.

Publication Date:

October 2005

Binding:

Paperback

Language:

English

Pages:

120

Dimensions:

9.00x6.00x.28 in. .41 lbs.