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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."
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."
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