Soto's poems [in "The Tale of Sunlight"] are set in an abstract landscape of sun, wind, sky and river that seems alive to the emotional needs of his people. His poems are simple, idiomatic, rhythmic and notable for the strange interplay between images of desperation and transcendence. In a key lyric called "The Shepherd," for example, a pickled three-legged chicken intrudes on the perfectly Apollonian picture of a boy descending from the hills with a harp swung over his shoulder. There's an ambivalence here between worldly and spiritual values that distinguishes the poetry from protest or apology—so the more you look between the lines, the more you see.

A review of "The Tale of Sunlight," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 214, No. 6, August 7, 1978, p. 78.