Tony Johnston, illustrated by Karen Barbour,
The Ancestors Are Singing.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

In Tony Johnston's Mexico, it is impossible to separate the present from the past. This new collection of myth-infused poems, inspired by the years she lived there, is a journey through Mexican history and culture. Quetzalcóatl, the plumed serpent god of Aztec mythology, gives maize to man; Tláloc (ancient god of rain) unleashes a devastating flood; and Hernán Cortés invades and conquers. Even the saguaro cactus, emblem of the desert, retains a memory of what came before: "When the land is dry, the saguaro remembers / storms."

The sensory perceptions of modern children bring this collection alive. In present day Mexico, a poor boy hawks newspapers on a corner in the "cold still-dark," a girl plays a "flute of cinammon bark," another sits at her story-telling grandmother's knee, "listening in wonder--like glistening / rain listens to / thunder." In "Small Church," one of the book's most magical poems, a young boy daydreams of "green balloon-trees" and, while everyone else listens to the padre, rides in his mind a "swift blue horse. . .never touching the ground."

Johnston uses both small, telling detail and startling metaphor to evoke her adoptive land. The "dust of. . .crushed rainsbows" falls from Diego Rivera's ghost in a museum in Anahuacalli, while on a Mayan temple, all we see is a "little snake / sleeping in a crack." In "Old Palaces," the poet combines powerful metaphor with recurring sound and rhythm to build one of the book's finest poems. Deep in the jungle,

old palaces fill the silence with old dreams,
alone except when splended gold gleams
of jaguars come to rest on their bones.

Karen Barbour's bold black-and-white illustrations dance with the energy of folk art. Images of fierce Aztec gods blend with swirling clouds, angels, and dark-braided women. While some rich-textured spreads crowd the poems, several are stunning in their power, such as the goddess Ixta spitting dark slivers of obsidian from an erupting volcano.

The Ancestors Are Singing covers a lot of historical ground. A glossary at the end identifies the names of gods, places, and Spanish words, but the poems are likely to spawn further questions and inquiry, and might be best used within a larger context. Indeed, Johnston suggests, as others have before her, that those who are alive to the past find the most magic in the present.

Joyce Sidman
Fall 2003