Sometimes it's tough to be a Texan. It takes a love of unpredictability to make a person strong enough to experience all that our good state has to offer. And it takes a certain native talent to write about the emotions and thrills that make up the everyday life of Texas.

James Hoggard is a true Texan.

A professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, Hoggard knows the excitement that Texas has to offer, and he conveys these thoughts and sentiments through the stories and observations in his book, "Riding The Wind & Other Tales."

Upon reading the title story of this collection, "Riding The Wind" (a narrative of the April 10, 1979, tornado that ravaged Wichita Falls), I found myself remembering all of the events of that fateful day. Hoggard's imagery and word choice make it seem like only yesterday that the tornado changed my life forever, and I found tears in my eyes as I read for the first time about the young mother who lost her children from underneath her in the tub. I've never heard that story, and I thought I'd heard them all.

Other stories in "Riding The Wind & Other Tales" are not as sad. Hoggard offers tender reminiscences of his Texas childhood and shares adult memories and meditations on life. He writes stories of what he knows best -- family and friends. Some of the tales are poignant, some are witty, some will make you chuckle out loud. This is short literature at its finest.

Raul Mesa represents a literary generation that came of age in the last half of the 20th century. His poetry is introspective and recounts the struggles his generation has had to contend with in the face of dramatic social, economic and political changes in Cuba. For more than thirty years Mesa has been a professor of biology at the University of Havana. During this same period he also dedicated himself to writing poetry. In 1996 and 1998 he was a visiting lecturer at universities in Texas, Alabama, and North Carolina. His poetry has appeared in the "Graham House Review." He has one of the largest private libraries in Cuba. The title, "Alone Against the Sea," was suggested in a statement made by the late Cuban poet, Dulce Maria Loynaz (1902-1997). In "Un verano en Tenerife" (1958) she asserts that it is easier to provide water for the world's deserts than for its islands; they are alone against the sea. James Hoggard, the able translator of this volume, is himself a poet, as well as a novelist, essayist and playwright. In 1999 he was co-winner of the Soeurette Diehl Fraser Translation Award for his work on this volume. He holds the McMurtry Distinguished professorship of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Oscar Hahn is the best poet of his generation in Chile, land of poets and home to Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Gonzalo Rojas, Enrique Lihn... the list of his elders is long. This book provides English-speaking readers with an excellent opportunity to enjoy his poetry in a carefully crafted bilingual edition. Hahn's visionary images are startling and uncanny, and translate well, bringing to mind Ezra Pound's notion of "fanopoea", poetry based above all on imagery. From a nuclear Apocalypse strangely reminiscent of biblical paradise to Madonnas in early Renaissance painting to the shocking transformation of daily life, his expressive power is well represented in this collection, and very well served by James Hoggard's competent and creative translation, which only falters on a couple of sonnets which were an impossible task anyway; poetic images - fanopoea - translate better than other poetic effects based mainly on sound, song, association with classical Spanish poetry, all of which are present in Hahn's admirable sonnets in Spanish and hardly appear in the English versions. (Translation always implies sacrifice, says William Gass in his enjoyable book "Reading Rilke"). Hoggard's introduction is helpful and perceptive when he speaks of Hahn as a "poet of the fantastic", with "intense, apocalyptic energy", and speaks also of his "quality of restraint" and "keenly focused sobriety". The balance between these apparently conflicting qualities is central to the enjoyment of Hahn's poetry.