José Emilio Pacheco’s Selected Poems is a major bilingual retrospective of the poetry of one of Mexico’s foremost writers. Born in 1939, Pacheco achieved recognition early, and while still in his twenties, he was already keeping company with the most important writers of his generation. A prolific poet and perfectionist, Pacheco published many volumes of poetry, including his famous 1969 collection No me preguntes como pasa el tiempo (Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By). This edition is edited by George McWhirter of The University of British Columbia, who worked closely with Pacheco himself in choosing the poems and their English translations. Besides McWhirter’s own versions are those by Edward Dorn, Alastair Reid, Katherine Silver, and others. As McWhirter writes: “In his singularity of vision and multiplicity of poetic forms, traditional and modern, Pacheco spans past and present in both Latin American and peninsular Spanish poetry. It is a glittering and giant technical achievement, as brilliant and instantly visible as Hart Crane’s The Bridge.”
