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The Unicorn Poem and Flowers and Songs of Sorrow

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Poet, historian, and college professor E. A. Mares was one of the leading lights of the Chicano renaissance. His Unicorn Poem, first published in 1980, has been hailed as a Chicano epic. The present volume includes thirty later poems under the subtitle “Flowers and Songs of Sorrow,” a meditation on the inevitable reversal of triumphs of conquest.

5½ x 8½ inches • 80 pages • ISBN 0-931122-65-1

Mares proposes not a myth of bloodletting, but one of survival in love and goodness. His is an image of the unity of all peoples who would side with nature against the spoilers of the earth. To avoid fixation on the enemy, he prefers to concentrate on his own people, but always through the lens of the writer whose real material is language.”

Bruce Novoa

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, E. A. “Tony” Mares achieved early recognition as a talented writer, lecturer and performer. For years he played the part of Padre Martinez, a leading historical figure in colonial times, lectured on New Mexico history and eventually published a scholarly volume on Martinez and his cultural legacy. Mares taught history and English at North Texas University in Denton, Texas and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Author of several collections of poetry, history and translations, his most recent volume of poems, With the Eyes of a Raptor, was published by Wings Press in 2005.