In Order to Talk with the Dead

"In order to talk with the deadyou have to know how to wait:they are fearfullike the first steps of a child.But if we are patientone day they will answer uswith a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror,with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace,with a dark return of birdsbefore the glance of a girlwho waits motionless on the threshold."-from "In Order to Talk with the Dead"Reared in the rainy forests of Chile's "La Frontera" region which had nurtured Pablo Neruda a generation earlier, Jorge Teillier has become one of Chile's leading contemporary poets, whose work is widely read in Latin America and Europe along with the poetry of his well-known contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. This English-Spanish bilingual anthology now introduces English-speaking readers to Teillier, with a representative selection of his best work from all phases of his career.Carolyne Wright has translated poems from the volumes Muertes y maravillas (1971), Para un pueblo fantasma (1978), and Cartas para reinas de otras primaveras (1985). Avoiding the bravura effects of some of his contemporaries, Teillier writes from a life lived directly and simply, returning time and again in his poetry to the timeless and mythic South of his boyhood, the "Land of Nevermore."