|
Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
Like a glazier reconstructing a mirror broken into a hundred
shards, Eduardo Moga assembles a portrait of his father, thirty
years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is
no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his
whole life in the grey, grey hardscrabble years of the Franco
dictatorship when it was 'as if everybody's feet smelt'. He is seen
with a forensic clarity through now a child's, now an adult's eyes
and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier
times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and
little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits,
angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his
erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga's great achievement,
he is a real living person. Moga writes with lyrical depth about
fathers who bequeath the best of themselves to their sons and sow
only distance, and about sons who cannot forgive their fathers'
vulgarity and cannot forgive their own estrangement and lack of
sympathy. Jose Angel Cilleruelo, El Balcon de Enfrente In this
splendid book Eduardo Moga dissects not just the story of a family
but the story of Spain. Francisco H. Gonzalez, Devaneos
I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide
selection of poems written about the city over the past two
centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I
couldn’t find anything written earlier. The poems had to be
recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems
written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter
into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task
beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned
London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have
an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the
protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an
outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a
real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront.
I didn’t select the poems on the basis of form or style. Streets
Where to Walk Is to Embark contains every kind of expression,
tradition, sensibility and voice – the only benchmark for
inclusion was quality. So the anthology, as well as being a
balanced history, is also a display of the breadth of styles of
current Spanish poetry, and of the poetry of the past. The poems
had to have been already published. I wasn’t looking for new
work, but for a significant historical record. —Eduardo Moga
|
Selected Poems (Paperback)
Eduardo Moga; Edited by Luis Ingelmo; Translated by Terence Dooley
|
R595
R523
Discovery Miles 5 230
Save R72 (12%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
We have become used to a life of routine and uniformity: at work,
in our relationships with others and with ourselves when we seek to
understand what surrounds and subjugates us. Messages flood in and,
instead of criticising reality, they reinforce the status quo and
encourage us to accept it and maintain it. To counterbalance the
hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices
raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga's, which don't mourn a
presumed lost golden age, or bewail their disillusionment. That
phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he
underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that
the gods do not love us, but torment us, and then put all his
efforts into unlearning it all. Moga's poetry does not preach,
however, or burden us with rules or ideas to bring us to an
imaginary better world, here or in the afterlife. The only life is
this, the here and now, the life of the body, the life of the
senses connecting us to the world. To restore our delight in the
present is not a trivial mission and Moga confronts us time and
again with our emotions and sensations, with the intention of
blotting out thereby the monotonous discourse of the
representatives of order. One might think, then, that the poet is
acting like a strategist on a battlefield. Far from the Manichaean
vision of the soldier, who is unable to see beyond dualities, this
poetry is nourished by subtlety, detail and precision. It is not
artillery, but a fine wielding of the scalpel which, with the
delicacy and determination of the silversmith, dissects the tumour
and cyst threatening our life, which is then able to flourish as a
result.
|
You may like...
Tenet
John David Washington, Robert Pattinson
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R54
R45
Discovery Miles 450
|