One of South America's most celebrated contemporary poets takes
us on a fantastic voyage to mysterious lands and seas, into the
psyche, and to the heart of the poem itself. "Night Journey" is the
English-language debut of the work that won Maria Negroni an
Argentine National Book Award. It is a book of dreams--dreams she
renders with surreal beauty that recalls the work of her compatriot
Alejandra Pizarnik, with the penetrating subtlety of Borges and
Calvino.
In sixty-two tightly woven prose poems, Negroni deftly infuses
haunting imagery with an ironic, personal spirituality.
Effortlessly she navigates the nameless subject to the slopes of
the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, through war, from icy
Scandinavian landscapes to the tropics, across seas, toward a
cemetery in the wake of Napoleon's hearse, by train, by taxis
headed in unrequested directions, past mirrors and birds, between
life and death.
"Night Journey" reflects a mastery of a traditional form while
brilliantly expressing a modern condition: the multicultural,
multifaceted individual, ever in motion. Displacement abounds: a
"medieval tabard" where a pelvis should be, a "lipless grin," a
"beach severed from the ocean." In one poem "nomadic cities" whisk
past. In another, smiling cockroaches loom in a visiting mother's
eyes.
Anne Twitty, whose elegant translations are accompanied by the
Spanish originals, remarks in her preface that the book's
"indomitable literary intelligence" subdues an unspoken
terror--helplessness. Yet, as observed by the angel Gabriel, the
consoling voice of wisdom, only by accepting the journey for what
it is can one discover its "hidden splendor," the "invisible center
of the poem." As readers of this magnificent work will discover,
this is a journey that, because its every fleeting image conjures a
thousand words of fertile silence, can be savored again and
again."
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