Poets for the Millennium – serie

Recognized as one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century, Jose Lezama Lima, born in Cuba in 1910, is associated with the Latin American neo-baroque and has influenced several generations of writers in and out of Cuba, including such prominent poets as Severo Sarduy and Nestor Perlongher. Lezama Lima's vision of America in a continental sense stands at the fertile confluence of indigenous, African, and European influences. A crucial experimental writer, he has been known in English chiefly for his novel Paradiso, while little of his poetry has been translated. This anthology is a comprehensive introduction to Lezama Lima's poetry. It presents for the first time in English a generous selection of his poems, as well as an interview, essays, and critical work on his poetics. Ernesto Livon-Grosman has selected elegant and precise translations by James Irby, G.J. Racz, Nathaniel Tarn, and Roberto Tejada. His insightful introduction places the poet in the wider context of Cuban and Latin American cultural history.

A shaman and visionary - not a poet in any ordinary sense - Maria Sabina lived out her life in the Oaxacan mountain village of Huautla de Jimenez, and yet her words, always sung or spoken, have carried far and wide, a principal instance and a powerful reminder of how poetry can arise in a context far removed from literature as such. Seeking cures through language - with the help of Psilocybe mushrooms, said to be the source of language itself - she was, as Henry Munn describes her, 'a genius [who] emerges from the soil of the communal, religious-therapeutic folk poetry of a native Mexican campesino people'. She may also have been, in the words of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, 'the greatest visionary poet in twentieth-century Latin America'. These selections include a generous presentation from Sabina's recorded chants and a complete English translation of her oral autobiography, her vida, as written and arranged in her native language by her fellow Mazatec Alvaro Estrada. Accompanying essays and poems include an introduction to "The Life of Maria Sabina" by Estrada, an early description of a nighttime 'mushroom velada' by the ethnomycologist R.Gordon Wasson, an essay by Henry Munn relating the language of Sabina's chants to those of other Mazatec shamans, and more.

Founder of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton has also come to be recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative and influential poets. The inaugural volume in the Poets for the Millennium series, Andre Breton offers the most comprehensive selection available in English of Breton's poetry, along with a selection of his major prose writings. The translations, a number of which are published here for the first time, are by some of the most notable poets in our language, including David Antin, Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Michael Benedikt, Robert Duncan, David Gascoyne, and Charles Simic. This volume also includes an extensive biographical and thematic introduction by Mark Polizzotti, which sets the poems in the context of Breton's life and overall career.

The best introduction to the work of Paul Celan, this anthology offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers. The present selection is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisele Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to Rene Char and Jean-Paul Sartre - all appearing here for the first time in English.

The poet Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) was an early twentieth-century Japanese modernist who today is known worldwide for his poetry and stories as well as his devotion to Buddhism. "Miyazawa Kenji: Selections" collects a wide range of his poetry and provides an excellent introduction to his life and work. Miyazawa was a teacher of agriculture by profession and largely unknown as a poet until after his death. Since then, his work has increasingly attracted a devoted following, especially among ecologists, Buddhists, and the literary avant-garde. This volume includes poems translated by Gary Snyder, who was the first to translate a substantial body of Miyazawa's work into English. Hiroaki Sato's own superb translations, many never before published, demonstrate his deep familiarity with Miyazawa's poetry. His remarkable introduction considers the poet's significance and suggests ways for contemporary readers to approach his work. It further places developments in Japanese poetry into a global context during the first decades of the twentieth century.In addition, the book features a Foreword by the poet Geoffrey O'Brien and essays by Tanikawa Shuntaro, Yoshimasu Gozo, and Michael O'Brien.

This selection of Gertrude Stein's work is taken from the period between 1905 and 1936, when the iconic modernist poet was engaged in an astounding number of still-surprising literary experiments, whose innovations continue to influence all the arts. Editor Joan Retallack has chosen complete texts or selections that lend themselves to a clarified vision of Stein's oeuvre. In her brilliant introduction, Retallack provides the historical and biographical context for Stein's lifelong project of composing a 'continuous present,' an effort which parallels many of the most important technological and scientific developments of her era - from moving pictures to Einstein's revision of our understanding of space and time.Retallack also addresses persistent questions about Stein's work and the best way to read it in our contemporary moment. In suggesting a performative 'reading poesis' for these works, Retallack follows Stein's dictum by arguing that to actively experience the work is to enjoy it, and to enjoy it is to understand it.

'Pleasure,' Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, 'is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.' This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Quebec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works - "Lovhers", "Ultra Sounds", "Museum of Bone and Water", "Notebook of Roses and Civilization" - along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

'Pleasure,' Jennifer Moxley writes in her introduction to this volume, 'is the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard's poetry.' This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Quebec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works - "Lovhers", "Ultra Sounds", 'Museum of Bone and Water", "Notebook of Roses and Civilization" - along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

This volume surveys the life and work of the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who is best known for his extraordinary garden, Little Sparta, a unique 'poem of place' in which poetry, sculpture, and horticulture intersect. This book directs sustained attention to Finlay the verbal artist, revealing the full breadth and richness of his poetics. It illuminates the evolution from his early years of composing plays, stories and lyrical poems to his discovery of Concrete poetry and his emergence as a key figure in the international avant-garde of the 1960s.