Lovely, Mark. Congratus!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
--- On Fri, 1/29/10, Halvard Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Halvard Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Horn tooting
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Friday, January 29, 2010, 9:03 AM
Bravo, Mark! If you've gotta be reviewed, this is
the way to do it.
Hal
Serving the tri-state area.
Halvard Johnson
================
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http://sites.google.com/site/halvardjohnson/Home
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> John Palattella in The Nation Feb. 15th issue
>
> “AND THERE IN THE DISTANCE,
> nothing./A line of houses one can hardly
> make out/through the white of snow and
> sun.” These lines from “The Fog,” by the
> Cuban poet Eugenio Florit, could double as
> a sketch of the view from the north, and from
> within Cuba itself, of recent Cuban literature.
> The US embargo has corrupted our
> view of the island, and Castro’s censors have
> stifled the publication of writing that departs
> from state-sanctioned optimismo. I found
> “The Fog” in The Whole Island: Six Decades of
> Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss (California;
> paper $29.95). Not since the 1982 publication
> of Paul Auster’s Random House Book
> of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual
> anthology so effectively broadened
> the sense of poetic terrain outside the United
> States and also created a superb collection
> of foreign poems in English. There is
> nothing else like it. Weiss presents generous
> selections of work by fifty-five poets from
> Cuba and its diaspora; though ostensibly an
> anthology, The Whole Island is a gathering of
> individual voices (among them those of the
> twenty-two translators who contributed to
> the project). In “On Three Photos of Mella,”
> Francisco de Oraá offers a riposte to Julio
> Mella, a founder of Cuba’s Communist Party
> and a disapproving superego: “I only know
> that, deep down, I would have wanted to be
> let loose in the garden,/and that the garden
> would grow and become the whole world.”
> Seeing through the fog (what Damaris Calderón
> calls this “sad business/this playing at
> being perfect”), Weiss has located the whole
> island’s many imaginary gardens.
>
>
> Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of
> California Press).
> http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
>
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