The Unicorn Poem & Flowers and Songs of Sorrow

Two titles in one. Poet, historian, and college professor, E. A. Mares is one of the true underground poets of the Chicano renaissance. His *Unicorn Poem*, first published in 1980, has been hailed as a Chicano epic. The present volume also comprises thirty-two poems of the last decade, including *Flowers and Songs of Sorrow*, a meditation on the inevitable reversal of the triumphs of conquest. Mares proposes not a myth of bloodletting, but one of survival in love and goodness. His is an image of the unity of all peoples who would side with nature against the spoilers of the earth. To avoid fixation on the enemy, he prefers to concentrate on his own people, but always through the lens of the writer whose real material is language.