THE WHITE DOVE

A Celebration of Father Kino

Jane Candia Coleman

High Plains Press

403 Cassa Road

Glendo WY 82213

Paper, 94 pages, $12.95

ISBN 978-0-931271-83-0

I first met Jane Candia Coleman on a warm October afternoon in her home in Tucson. Appropriate for a writer who has written extensively about the West, she lives on one of the last dirt streets in town in an adobe house with high ceilings and wood beams and Western paintings on the wall, a writing desk by the front door. That afternoon, Coleman was quick to smile and laugh as she smoked Camels while we shared Coronas and spoke of books and writing.

Before then, she had written the acclaimed volume of poetry entitled No Roof But Sky, and also the follow up The Red Drum, as well as her memoir Mountain Time about her search for independence, her escape from an abusive husband, and her open-arm welcome of the wide-open spaces out West. In all of this, she has shown a keen eye for extraordinary moments by focusing on the small, ordinary things that many fail to see. She continues this style in her most recent volume of poetry, The White Dove.

In doing so, she traces and re-imagines the historical figure of Father Kino, an Italian Jesuit who pioneered Christian missions in the Southwest in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. While these poems don t tell us much of the day-to-day mission work of Kino, or his interactions with Native Americans, they do explore what Coleman perceives as his soul, and how the stark beauty of the Southwest became as much a part of him as he became a part of it. If upon leaving Italy he was A tree ripped from earth, crying out, as does a child / taken from its mother ( Farewell ), he soon knew the invisible motion of mountains, and walked the painted valleys / where antelope flow through brittle light / as if sand has become water. ( Passages )

In an image symbolic of Kino s attempt to merge native culture with Christianity, Coleman provides us with Offertory, where a tiny lizard darts across the alter like the edges of thought. To show Kino s humility, and his desire to accept what might be foreign to him, Coleman offers this ending to the poem:

Tell me that even the smallest

are blessed, as that I may indulge

in delight at the sight of one quick,

flickering lizard upon this humble alter.

As for whether Native Americans had their own prayers, their own traditions, that might mix with Christianity, Coleman s Kino recognizes that God is in all things, all hearts, and Who s to say what prayer / will be denied or answered? ( Sonora Spring ) In the same way, Kino is shown asking himself if he is sane or mad to reach out each morning, like any pagan of my flock / to cup the rising sun / and worship light? ( Angelus )

Sadly, the attitude which Coleman posits in Kino was rarely present, then or now, in our dealing with those of other cultures something Coleman recognizes when she has Kino consider the Spanish search for pearls in Baja, to which he says:

And we men come bringing greed

and Christianity, greed s antithesis.

( In Search of Pearls ) Or at least that s what Christianity is supposed to be or perhaps was in the hands of Kino, who, as Coleman says, brought faith unwritten to a place where my tablet s but a stretch / of sand, and all the wisdom / of the world is written by the stars. ( Temporal Wishes )

These are finely crafted poems written b a mature poet, and they reveal a part of history of the Southwest little known but now told with a poetic spirit, as Kino himself must surely deserve.