[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was read, in a slightly different version, at the Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures in Baton Rouge in February 1982.]

One of the principal characteristics of Soto's poetry is the apocalyptic vision it reflects of the universe. Recurring images of loss, disintegration, decadence, demolition, solitude, terror and death create a desolate landscape in which the voice of the narrator is that of a passive, impotent observer, helplessly caught up in the inexorable destruction of human ties. Within this seemingly hopeless, profoundly grey world of Soto's poems, however, occasional affirmative images introduce muted, contrapuntal notes of something akin to hope.

In his first collection, The Elements of San Joaquín, for example, the presence of dust, both from the fields and from the mortal remains of the men who work them, and the action of the wind that sweeps everything before it and reduces all things to dust, are two of the most persistent images. Both dust and wind are elements of an environment that is both hostile and indifferent to human solitude and suffering. Soto often juxtaposes these two images in the same poem to suggest apocalyptic forces:

               The wind strokes
               The skulls and spines of cattle
               To white dust, to nothing….

At first glance, this image [from "Wind"] appears to be totally negative since it depicts the slow, irreversible disintegration of the cattle skulls, and by extension those of mankind as well, into dust and then into nothingness. Faced with the terrifying indifference of the wind, which destroys everything—mountains, cattle, or the footprints of beetles, each individual existence becomes inconsequential, ephemeral, all traces of its presence obliterated as if it had never been. Upon closer examination, however, we discover an image that functions on multiple levels in this passage, one which is simultaneously harmonious and discordant. On one hand, the image "strokes" accentuates the terror and aggression implicit in the action of the wind because it denotes hitting or striking a blow…. On the other hand, "strokes" also … represents the diametrically opposite action of caressing, flattering, soothing. On another level, "strokes" also means the sound of a bell or clock ringing the hour, an image which inevitably recalls the passing of time, an action which brings with it the natural disintegration and wearing away of things, a universal law to which man has yet to discover an alternative. (pp. 35-6)

By reducing all the creation to dust: the mountains, reduced grain by grain to loose earth; the cattle, whose bones become white dust; the insects, birds and plants, whose tracks are obliterated by its action, and finally man, whose exhalations are dissipated in the air, the wind acquires the personification of an anti-generative, anti-mythic force. Parallel to this negative vision, however, a regenerative force coexists within the poem which mitigates the negative indifference of the wind. Without being diverted from its destructive course, the wind pushes beyond physical disintegration, beyond chaos, beyond nothingness, to initiate a new creative cycle of existence, within which, ironically, the same demolishing wind becomes a generative force:

          The wind picks up the breath of my armpits
          Like dust, swirls it
          Miles away
 
          And drops it
          On the ear of a rabid dog,
          And I take on another life….

At this point it becomes evident that the ambiguity between the contradictory functions of the wind … constitutes the axis upon which the poem itself hinges since it establishes a dramatic tension between the disintegrative and regenerative forces operant within the poem.

The importance of this device of ambiguity in Soto's poetry becomes apparent in the consistency with which it is used to create precisely this impression of dramatic tension within the apocalyptic framework so characteristic of his artistic expression. Repeatedly one encounters similar images of disintegration and death mitigated by an ironically positive twist…. (p. 37)

[Soto] achieves his highest artistic brilliance and aesthetic subtlety in those poems, of which "Wind" is an excellent example, in which ambiguity becomes an expansive force not only by multiplying metaphorical and linguistic levels of meaning, but also by dilating the philosophical and dramatic dimensions of the fundamental theme of human existence. Such existence is revealed in Soto's poetry as a long and painful via crucis, a spiritual pilgrimage into a past peopled by spectres of privation, loneliness and death. Nevertheless, subtly but unequivocally, Soto manages to counterbalance this inhospitable existence by incorporating ambiguities that not only reduce the power of death to subjugate man definitively, but also substantially reduce the terror and finality of annihilation by implying a capacity in man to survive and overcome the limitations of his destiny. (p. 38)