Somewhere near the turn of the century the world changed. Nature was no longer a well-oiled machine; man was no longer its caretaker. Logos was no longer distinct from Chaos but interlaced by it. Space and time, matter and energy, man and nature: the old categories blurred. In the poetry of Angel Gonzalez, space-time has personal dimensions, or to put it another way, personality extends through space and time giving his poems a depth of feeling, where "warm yellow street- lamps," the "whistling wind," or a "still warm bullet" are not merely phenomena of nature, but expressions of the self. Often Gonzalez's poems have the sense of almost a bildungsroman where the innocence of childhood memories mature in perspective. But there is more here than just a growth from innocence to awareness. The contrast between the child's understanding and the adults' coupled with the narrator's later realization and appropriation of their feelings creates both a tension in the poem and a fulfillment. Time loses its sense of linearality, the nostalgia for the lost child is replaced by an intense empathy that both transcends time and defines it. But the awareness reached is painful because what defines the past is uncertainty, fear, agony, and rage. In this way, identification and alienation become paradoxically linked aspects of the poet's psyche.

The title "First Evocation," while it includes the calling of his mother to memory, by the qualifying "first" suggests also that the memory of his mother creates within the poem a changed perception of the world that continues to hold meaning for the poet. He begins by remembering his mother as "afraid" of the wind, of thunder, of war, and, even though the cause of her fear is far away, both spatially in the sense that wind and thunder indicate a storm's approach and temporally as seen by her fear of war "before the last breaking of the treaty."

For the child the "whistling wind" is a "merry sweeper," and while the "thunder/ thundered too much," "impossible/ to endure . . . without horror," "nothing ever happened afterwards." The rain erased "the lightning's violent outline" and the rainbow "put a bucolic end to so much racket."

The coupling of war and storm in the first stanza serve as a way for the writer to de-emphasize the mother's fear. The return to war in the fourth stanza, however, stands as a corrective to the child's perception. Peace comes, but this time "the wind did not bring back what it had swept." "What was lost was lost forever,/ what was dead stayed dead."

The storm takes on harsher connotations. The "wind/ takes possession of the streets," "beats upon the doors, and flees." The lightning "splits the air," "makes "cats' backs bristle" (note the harshness of the glottal-stopped s's), and upsets "the magnetic north." The focus has pulled back from the childish perception of unchangedness after the storm to its destructive fury. And just as the past is made present in the poet's feelings, concepts of space are changed. Categories like "far away" and "small" become their opposites. War, like the storm, devastating, may be in "distant lands with tiny corpses,/ far-off crimes, small orphans . . ." but the reader, like the narrator, like his mother, know its "horror" is nearby, just in front of us.

In the same way "Zero City" juxtaposes the child's perceptions of war: "a suspension of classes,/ Isabelita in the cellar in diapers," war's "daily marvels" with the "almost incomprehensible/ grief of the grownups,/their tears, their fear,/ their smothered rage." Just as the narrator in "First Evocation" was aware of the "horror" of the storm, even though a child, so, the narrator in "Zero City" has "mixed feelings" about the war. What differentiates "Zero City," however, is that the adult's pain is for the narrator partly comprehensible, even if only "through some crack" "vanish[ing] . . . swiftly." The drama of the poem lies in the way in which the "daily marvels" of the child become "blurred" while what was "scarcely noticed/ at the time" surges up to become "this pervading fear,/ this sudden rage,/ this unpredictable/ and deep desire to weep"--the line breaks emphasizing each "this," the poet's "now for always."

But "[t]he story does not end here." The present may only be "a little pause so that we may rest." Where "First Evocation" and "Zero City" pull a painful past into the present, "Intermission" pulls an equally painful future, because inevitably growing from the past, into the present. On the surface a poem about the intermission during a play, the tone is almost whimsical. The intermission is a breathing space from the "tension" and "emotion released by the plot" in which "dancers and actors, acrobats/ and distinguished audience" can "happily/ agree that it was all a lie." In this way, the intermission serves as a means of diminishing the distance between actor and audience, observer and observed. Further, the poet removes the distance between himself and the reader, telling us, "we know," "we have seen."

The play is a tragedy, made up of "several quick scenes that foretold death," a "betrayal" and a "betrayer;" "the despair is clearly/ outlined." The "exuberant gestures," "the terror/ that controls/ their movements on stage," the "ineffective and torturous dialogues" that might be seen as weak acting or a trite play are interpreted within the poem as if the actors were actually trying "to avoid the rigors of fate" or "hide their cowardice." Perhaps, the poet suggests, this "broken panorama" "will later explain many things, will be/ the key that at the end will justify/ it all."

Justification becomes a central theme in the poem, as perhaps it has been in each of the others. In "Intermission", the narrator suggests actions from the play that may serve to justify "yesterday," that "vanished time." The "words of love," "the disguised expression, the violence/ with which someone said:/ `No,'," and the "surprise produced" by the gardener's statement all suggest choices, open-endedness, a reversal of the "despair" and "betrayal" already suggested as the end of the play. By realizing his connections to the past, and making its pain a part of himself, Gonzalez hopes to transcend it. What "I Myself" suggests is that the poet can never get beyond himself, and as a result his "body walks by itself, getting lost,/ distorting whatever plans [he] make[s]." "Intermission" draws a starker conclusion. As "the drama continues and the feigned/ grief/ becomes real in our hearts," Gonzalez realizes the past can't be transcended, that what the past feared, wept for, raged at, "is near," that the future, like the past, "will end, no doubt,/ as it must end, as it is written,/ as it must inevitably happen."