In Gary Soto's The Elements of San Joaquin (1977) the world struggles to survive disintegrating forces, from natural, to social, to human, that grind on in cyclic fashion. While one line of energy seems bent on reducing the elements to stasis and nothingness—entropy—another tries to structure the elements into combinations of living units. Even the writing of the text is a struggle between the word and a silence that would confirm human isolation and social chaos. Yet there is no reassuring idealism or even optimism in Soto. He reduces things to bare elements, speaks of them coldly, as if from a distance. Yet this is not the clarity of objectivity. The metaphor for his life-vision can be found in "Field Poem." From a bus for migrant farm workers, the persona looks back and sees the cotton field "From the smashed bus window."… Soto and his persona look...