Add my congrats!!!
And I can brag that I own a copy of Mark's wonderful book!
All the best,
Judy
On 29 January 2010 15:35, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Toot, toot! Mark, Congratulations on this.
>
> Doug
> On 29-Jan-10, at 9:46 AM, Mark Weiss 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
>>
>>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> Swept snow, Li Po,
> by dawn's 40-watt moon
> to the road that hies to office
> away from home.
>
> Lorine Niedecker
>
--
Frisky Moll Press: http://judithprince.com/home.html
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