SOURCE: “I Can Hear You Now,” in Parnassus, Vol. 8, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1979, pp. 297-311.

In the following excerpt, Cooley praises the distinctive nature of Soto's verse.

They keep coming back: the ring of a streetcar on Grand River Avenue, the flies that hummed by a light on the screen porch, the squeak of my grandfather's huge leather chair. Under the spell of Stanley Plumly and Gary Soto, these and other sensations of my own World War II childhood in Detroit have surfaced and re-surfaced in recent weeks. Set down here in discursive prose, they can't be heard by anyone except me. But when you read Out-of-the-Body Travel and The Elements of San Joaquin, your past, too, will swim up out of the lost worlds into which Stanley Plumly's and Gary Soto's memory books plunge us. …

Gary Soto's poetry carries less life-lived-through than Plumly's. The Elements of San Joaquin, winner...