Chronicle of My Worst Years

``I don't know what got me to open/ time's damn door/ and see again/ the dusty, gravelly barrio/ where I learned to be less than I was.'' This mature collection, which everywhere suggests a deeply personal psychological reckoning, brims with intelligence and a slow humor that never laughs aloud, reminiscent of Ecclesiastes. Villanueva (Shaking Off the Dark), who writes in Spanish, is a Chicano whose childhood as a migrant farm worker in Texas during the '40s and '50s has left him with memories of pain and a sense of dulled experience which the poems visit and turn over in a cautious, allusive mode. His tone is complex and hard to characterize, more on the order of wistful disappointment about closed paths than anything like self-pity; even his bitter resentment of Anglo bigotry somehow avoids peevishness: ``Teach me to save myself from those who/ with wrathful hand cut off the germinal hope/ from my first breath on and wrecked my days.'' Not particularly musical, but possessed of a narrative rhythm which translator Hoggard follows capably, Villanueva is a writer to spend time with. (Oct.)