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.