Maria Sabina: Selections (Poets for the Millennium, 2)
Jerome Rothenberg, Editor.
Paperback

Jerome Rothenberg presents a wonderful introduction to the life, visions, and works of this illiterate healer who cured with her words in the midst of mushroom-induced trances. She lived most of her life in grinding poverty in the Oaxacan village of Huautla de Jimenez in Mexico, comforted only by the visions of the “little ones”–hallucinogenic mushrooms. In the midst of one of her visionary encounters, she was invited to read a holy book and the words she saw there gave her the power to create long chants about herself as the healing woman/the sun woman/the silk scarf woman/the doll woman/the bruised woman/the tungsten woman, and on and on in a manner similar to the great “Thunder the Perfect Mind” text in the Nag Hammadi Library. In fact, some of the similarities are uncanny between this anonymous, gnostic-like text, and the words of this poor woman from the Mexican countryside. Both the story of her life, and the translation offered here of her words, are so powerful that you will never forget Maria Sabina. This humble woman has long been a member of my Pantheon of Makers.

The Zuni Enigma: A Native American People’s
Possible Japanese Connection
by Nancy Yaw Davis

The author suggests that medieval Japanese sea-goers arrived just in time to join the Zuni Native Americans in their search for the center of the world. The Japanese, according to the author, were also on a search for the Western Paradise of the Jodo Shu and Shin-Shu Buddhists. Somehow these two searches became one and the Japanese group over time became part of the Zuni genetic and cultural heritage. Davis points to linguistic, genetic and cultural parallels between the Zuni and the Japanese, reconsiders ancient stories of the Zuni, and presents some dubious artifacts as evidence for her claims. I found myself wishing for more evidence more clearly presented. Still, the thesis is intriguing enough to warrant close consideration.

The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa
Eileen Tabios, Editor.

This book is a delight. The sampling of Villa’s experimental and visionary work is good. The memoirs and essays at the end of the book are superb. One writer wonders why Villa does not appear in contemporary anthologies of modernist and postmodernist anthologies and posits the “otherness” of Villa as Philippine-American as the cause. I agree, but also suggest that Villa’s “wrestling with God” in the sense that Hopkins and the 17th c. Metaphysicals did, did not endear him to the decidedly secular critics of the latter half of the 20th c. This book also includes short stories and Villa’s own criticism as well. Deign of the book is good, and the title poem is worth the price of admission alone. Read this book and rediscover a minor master.

The typographic experiments of e.e. cummings (a major crush), inspired Villa to insert commas between each word in certain poems and thus to invent a new and exciting kind of writing both in the visual look of the poem and the sound of the poem upon its performance. Villa claimed that “comma poems” required a new kind of appreciation from its readers and provides in this book a manifesto to tell us exactly how to achieve the required level.