Shortly after the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, Iran do Espirito Santo, in Sao Paulo, contacted Enrique Juncosa, in Mallorca, proposing to collaborate on a book. It so happened that Juncosa had started some poems in prose related to travels based on personal memories and imagination, and which referred to a way of life that was suddenly suspended. He wrote 40 poems, suggesting the idea of quarantine, encompassing quarantine, encompassed under the title Pangolin, an animal pointed out as the initial propagator of the virus. Do Espirito Santo made 40 watercolours, one per poem, related to the text, although not always in an evident way, suggesting an inner journey. Floating images in a white space, abstract and geometric in origin, with the delicacy of oriental miniatures. Text in English and Spanish.

A distinguished art gallery director, and curator of major exhibitions by some of the art world's most celebrated names, Enrique Juncosa is also a much-admired poet in his native Spanish. Bay of Flags & other poems draws on the two most recent of his six Spanish publications and introduces English language readers to what translator Michael Smith in his Introduction calls "a boundless curiosity about other people and places, an astonishingly broad interest in most of the major art forms, and an enthusiasm to experiment that matches the novelty of what he has encountered on his travels." Formally energetic and singularly engaging, Juncosa's poetry reveals what the poet himself terms "a certain obsession with lists and proper names, of people and places"-as well as a focus on the external world that will hold the reader's attention throughout even where it refuses linear narrative or tidy conclusion. "Ultimately," as Michael Smith puts it, "the poems are celebratory, of the world in all its incomprehensible strangeness and its beauty." The opportunity to read them now in this dual-language volume is is itself cause for celebration.

Howard Hodgkin is one of the foremost British painters of the last 100 years and his vivid, abstract works have been exhibited internationally for over four decades. His interest in attempting to capture and recreate moments of time and the fleeting impressions resulting from human interactions makes his approach in some ways more akin to that of the writer than the traditional painter. Perhaps for this reason his work has always had a resonance for those whose medium is primarily literary rather than visual. "Writers on Howard Hodgkin" gathers together for the first time the responses of a selection of leading novelists, critics, poets, travel writers and journalists to his paintings. Through the variety of voices it features and the range of literary approaches they employ, this collection provides remarkable new insights into Hodgkin's work, as well as examples of some of the most incisive writing on the arts to have been published in recent years. Illustrated in full colour, this is a unique combination of the visual and the written word and a fitting tribute to a remarkable artist. "Writers on Howard Hodgkin" includes writing by Julian Barnes, Bruce Bernard, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Alan Hollinghurst, Anthony Lane and Susan Sontag, as well as newly commissioned texts by Enrique Juncosa and Colm Toibin.