Native Meso-American Spirituality

This book is simply essential for libraries belonging to poets, historians, pre-columbian and otherwise, -- art and otherwise, -- plain literary types . . . (why purchase some dud modern "poet" with only a few jewels in the mud when you can have an entire culture's fragments in one thin volume? -- the real poetry of this book is what isn't read, what is felt beyond, the lost worlds of the Maya, the Toltecs, the Aztecs, and so on . . . all the poems, songs, stories that didn't survive). Some of the most beautiful poems, or as they are called in a few of the selections, "flower-songs", I have ever read anywhere, and from any time, are to be found here. Yes, "I was absolutely riveted . . . ." That these selections are rendered into familiar and comfortable (to modern Western poetic sensibilities) and yet faithful to the original form is more than just a service of the anthropological-historical kind, it is a high literary success by Mr. Leon-Portilla and all those others involved in this project. There is no world like the New World, which is still New to us that have taken up the task of finally "discovering" it after all these centuries following its conquest instead of obscuring it, masking its enchanting past, -- found in histories, stories, memories become dreams, and vice versa, which escaped the conqueror's destructive hand -- in our own kind of lies and reflective interpretations like a great cultural of our own filth muddying their magical waters . . . no less atrocious a crime not just to them but to all men than the ugly graffiti of the American flag on the moon . . . if you want to go digging in the rubble for some real treasures, read this book . . . it's light, -- like gold should be, and, you know, you won't drown with it in your pocket if you take it on travels crossing waters . . . I mean that this is the real gold that the Spanish missed when they tried to annihilate not just a cultural tradition but an essence of mind, an essence of man, which we can certainly make a good go of recapturing, or at least see in the nearing distance, by reading their poetry and song . . . find this book, -- find a real "lost civilization" that isn't lost at all except by our own losing of it. Now how can you throw away an entire world?