Mood and Theme of GROUND OF THIS BLUE EARTH The seventy poem landscape-of-vision quest comprising Ground of This Blue Earthevokes and reinvents with lyrical and passionate intensity an ahistorical and historical past and an imaginative dream- and-desertscape present and future as sensate, fertile, and evocative ground-both loci and metaphor-for embracing anew native peoples, primal place, an ineffable, immutable, and always elusive cultural dream, and for all made things, "figure[s] of want." Its spiritual geography and geometry harkens always from the heart- radiating outward from internal reality to a place of stillness, and dark, of all that is absent, and not. Both its vision of landscape and landscape-of-vision invoke interior creative calls, correspondences, and synergies in the aesthetic, cultural, psychological, social, and spiritual realms. One sees and resees as painterly constructs the past, present, and invented American West as fact and fraud, psyche and sense, templates for timelessness and temporality by focusing extensively on cross-cultural and multiracial New Mexico environs and subjects as touchstones for contradictory explorations of the Self, the fusion of blue's many manifestations, and for attaining spiritual ground in the symbolical True West. The contiguous tripartite structure-each section enveloping the other to form a cohesive whole-plays consciously with the ambiguous and multi-layered concepts of "blue" and "ground" as they instantiate and invest the poetic journey west from northern New England in Part I with its dominant leitmotifs. The physical landscape blue fuses with its artistic vision and ultimately with the poet's own alienation and meditations as he moves through the expansive Midwest to the Jornada del Muerto Trinity site-a "ground" of fire and nuclear devastation, "An ossuary of light . . ./Too quiet to burn." Part II places the poet squarely in the originary Southwest, the blue now seen from the sky as his plane descends, "awaiting blue-blue dawn, green-green day." The psychic trek from sorrow to spring and summer renewal nearly complete, the poems become briefer, more lyrical, more intensely meditative. This primal awakening, suffused with light and song, proves to be the poet's true ground. That affirmation of redemptive place is enhanced by both the number and intensity of lyrics in Part III, the longest section in which the exultant Self, singing mostly sotto voce, finds its true expression of vision and voice among native peoples and native customs under a timeless blue on Pueblo land, ground where even cattle ascend "Until they become almost blue/Almost white/And rising," and inherently among its timeless indigenes, whose ancestors, abuelos, shamen, still prowl the dark mountains and Puy.
