Chokecherry Hunters and Other Poems

These verses reflect a child's response to nature: the first snow, twilight on the prairie, dark of the desert, winter footprints. Yet they all carry an undertone of sadness, of the transiency of life, unusual to a young boy. The title poem has the same brooding vision imbuing the great lyrical poetry of the ancient Nahua people of Mexico, the Aztecs and the Toltec poet-king Nezahualcoyotl. In the foreword Frank Waters salutes Concha, not only for his precocious talent and enviable success, but as a growing artist of substance and integrity, ''...recording the steps of his way toward that wholeness of spiritual maturity that sometime must be achieved by us all.''

Joseph L. Concha was born and grew up at the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. He attended the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe and the University of New Mexico.