Maria Baranda is one of the leading Mexican poets of the generation, born in the 1960s. Her work has received Mexico's distinguished Efrain Huerta and Aguascalientes national poetry prizes, as well as Spain's Francisco de Quevedo Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. She is increasingly known for her sweeping and incisive long poems and book-length projects, and this volume contains two such works: 'To Tell' and the title poem.

Poetry. Fiercely elegiac, the title poem of Paul Hoover's DESOLATION: SOUVENIR began as a "filling in" of the blank spaces in A Tomb for Anatole, Paul Auster's translation of Mallarmes grief-stricken notes for a poem that he never completed on the death of his ten-year-old son. However, Hoover's writing soon turned to his own consideration of life, death, the breaking of family relations, and loss of love as experienced by all of us: "when death plays / with a child / it goes out nimble / comes back cold / life that traitor / aboard a razor boat." Written in three terse stanzas, each of the poem's 50 pages offers a phrase that becomes the title of its opposite number at the other end of the manuscript. The result is a haunting echoic effect that becomes especially rich as the phrases "cross" at the middle of the sequence. At times, the poem mourns the loss of the earth itself: "what will be enough / when the earth / contains no one / will the harvest still be full" and "no bees in the hive, no hive / sound returns to its bell." Inspired by his reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the companion poem, "The Windows (The Actual Acts)," consists of a series of philosophical propositions in everyday language: "An object is the actual awaiting further action. / It can wait a long time. / Time is fresh in objects even when they decay. / You can't give one example of time getting old." Another series of thoughts begins: "Have you every gazed from a window to see if everything's still there? / And see your own face in the glass, superimposed on the view? / Consciousness rests among its objects. / Which makes the objects restless." Long established as a poet of wit and intelligence, Paul Hoover now establishes himself as an important voice of deep emotional resonance and far ranging vision.

At once rhythmically charged and stilled by the silences, Paul Hoover's Poems in Spanish takes the English language into fraternity with the haunting lyricism of Spanish, and in this way pays tribute to the great poets writing in the Ibero Hispanic tradition of the 20th century-among them Pessoa, Lorca, Vallejo, Andrade, Neruda, Sabines. Poems in Spanish is a collection written in English, but it is an English that surprises with its sharply etched and yet resonant cadences. Hoover's achievement reminds us that we often must hear our own voice translated through other mediums before we can receive it most accurately, and before we can recognize most truthfully its sounding of our own deepest sensibilities. Hoover's poems include as their subjects the ethics of interpersonal relations, the social identity's conflicted relationship to self discovery, and the family bounds which function as a frame that both supports and limits our potential. Yet, just as we have come to see in Hoover's previous collections, this poet is equally interested in using subject matter's representation of event to examine what is occluded by the event of representation. These poems demonstrate how a reader can find in poetry a source of pleasure-for the ear, the heart, and imagination.

A lyrical collection of the finest poems by a leading Mexican poet, superbly translated for English readers "A literary event. . . . [Baranda's] work provides a bestiary as fierce as those found in the Odyssey, Beowulf, or The Waste Land."-Merrill Kaitz, Arts Fuse "A valuable collection . . . a metaphysical and philosophical luminosity of language that immerses the reader in cycles of life, death, and a quest for understanding what it means to be able to perceive."-Susan Smith Nash, World Literature Today The poetry of Maria Baranda is a haunting homage to the natural world, transcendent in scope, attentive to the particular, and acutely attuned to the mystery of being. Absorbed by nature's otherness, Baranda seeks to inhabit the voices of the wind, of wings, night, day, and perhaps most keenly, water. These lyrical verses turn repeatedly to the longings and griefs of embodiment: "What is that God / To be praised with all our sadness / If not love / Or at least the wonder / Of being a body full of blood," Baranda asks. Drawing on epics such as the Aeneid and Beowulf, the mystical verses of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and writers who engage the landscape of shore and sea, from Daniel Defoe to Dylan Thomas, this sweeping collection brings together the finest poems of one of today's most powerful and innovative Mexican writers.

Paul Hoover's The Novel is a booklength poem written in response to the author's experience of having his first novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making. Hoover examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet's point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors? A mosaic in organization, the poem's thirty parts mix, among others, Shakespeare and deconstructionist "shoptalk" with an account of Graceland when Elvis was alive and a gloss of the mass-market paperback of James M. Cain's The Enchanted Isle, whose heroine Mandy appears in the poem as the fictive author's lover. The Novel presents no dichotomy between pop culture and the intensely literary, resisting closure by replicating the counterpoint speed of obsessive TV channel-changing. "The closer the look one takes at a world/the greater the distance from which it looks back."