Mora visits 'Aunt Carmen'

There are only two possibilities for a book titled "Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints." It can either be really, really amusing or really, really awful. It can be an innovative work of lyrical genius, or it can be a book that, well, should be left to gather dust on the shelf in a convent somewhere.

REVIEW
	Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints Pat Mora

While "genius" is a very strong word, Pat Mora does manage to create a witty tongue-in-cheek portrait in a book of poetry that conveys the life and faith of an 80-year-old woman. This is, admittedly, an extremely subdued subject, but as Mora will demonstrate in her reading at Shaman Drum this evening, in this book the subject never attempts to take itself too seriously.

Aunt Carmen has been cleaning the church for years, and her prayers have become nothing but a thinly disguised veil of her life story. She has prayed since the age of 16 for "a handsome man who would never stray," but now she delights only in the birth of her grandchildren and in the fact that the local priest is afraid of her. Her life story, in muddled Spanish and English, is that of feisty independence and extreme stubbornness ... hardly what you would expect from an old wife and mother.

But then, Aunt Carmen is very rarely what you would expect. As she says, "I know about scaring men. Haven't I been married for 60 years? Marriage works best when men think we're volcanoes .... Los hombres walk more carefully around us then." Perhaps she doesn't always fit the traditional mold. Perhaps she does.

Mora, the author of "House of Houses," writes each entry of Aunt Carmen's life using a varied conglomeration of traditional poetic forms, each meant to suit the background of Carmen in a different mode. Each structure, like its subject, is stubborn and inflexible, yet forgiving of the diversity of language and emotion which Carmen possesses, and in her language Mora creates a lyrical past for her.

"Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints" is a thin volume, with an illustration fitting nearly every poem and pages containing a variety of color and light. The book's appearance fits its contents, and its contents fit its author, and its author fits its subject. This is the only order that should exist in a self-respecting book of poetry.

Mora has been called "one of the most significant Chicana poets of our time," but she is, more appropriately, an author of the past, one who is able to appreciate convention and her own ancestry. And as such, Aunt Carmen, with her grandmotherly rebellion, is all the more endearing. "Let me bring you down to smell these roses from my garden," she says. "I tell them about you. Like children, they like a story."

This is not delicate, writing-journal poetry. This is poetry to be read aloud, read by a strong woman with a rich, laughing voice and a Spanish lilt to accentuate the rhythm.

It is poetry to be read over a cup of steaming tea by someone who will divert onto tangential stories about their childhood and their memories of the book's illustrations. Its only drawback is that there aren't enough of those stories around anymore.

Mora has been the recipient of a Kellogg Leadership Fellowship, Southwest Book Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

"Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints" has the same sort of homespun, good old-fashioned magic, and is an unusual treat of New Mexico tradition.

11-04-97