Joropo en Barinas, Venezuela

This performance of joropo music and dancing was arranged to greet me at the small airport in Barinas, Venezuela, when I arrived as part of the 9th Annual Festival Mundial de Poesia, held in honor of poet and photographer Enrique Hernandez d'Jesus.  Sorry for the confusing turns of the camera.  Joropo music is played by three instruments, here as is traditional a harp, guitar, and maracas.  Barinas is in the south of Venezuela and on Los Llanos (flatlands) not far from the Andes.  A book of my poetry, Intencion y su materia, translated by the wonderful Mexican poet, Maria Baranda, was published by Monte Avila Editores and presented at the conference's main site in Caracas.

En el idioma y en la tierra

I just had a beautiful bilingual edition of my work published by Conaculta in Mexico City.  Many thanks to the publisher and to the amazing poet Maria Baranda, who translated the work and so generously made all this possible.  Titled En el idioma y en la tierra (In Idiom and Earth), it consists primarly of work from Winter Mirror (Flood Editions, 2002), Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), and Edge and Fold (Apogee, 2006).  The book was just published last week so it will be a few weeks  until the book is available to the public at Conaculta's bookstores in Mexico.  Thanks also to Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary, Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and Alice Jones and Ed Smallfield, the original publishers of the work.  I'm pasting in below Maria's translation of "Driver's Song":

Canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,

distante y solitaria Danville.

Carro negro, luna pequeña,

en el asiento trasero la cerveza.

Porque olvidé todos los caminos

nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio.

En las llanuras, a través de Indiana,

donde también estuve solo.

Carro negro, luna amarilla.

Mi padre muerto me observa

desde la ventana de arriba.

Qué camino más largo desde California

y en qué coche más rápido–

invisible para el alma.

Más allá veo a la muerte moviéndose lenta en el camino.
Sé que tocaré su vestimenta
antes de que jamás llegue a Danville, Ohio.

Distante y solitaria Danville.

Maria Baranda's Ficticia

Published 15 August 2010

Translated by Joshua Edwards Paperback, 80pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611238.

Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice:

The sky is in my eyes.
I have fallen silent before the hurricane of its proverbs,
the jaws of thirst rising
from cracks in the mud.
I have fallen silent.
I have fallen silent before the men and children
and women hidden
like raw birds in cloaks of invisibility.
I have felt the shame of being someone
in my own words.
To live in ash inseparable
from filth and extermination,
to accept time covered in mold,
sullen time, time in the throat
that officiates the vertigo
of sacrilege and solitude between its cries.
(Sky Cycle ii)

Download a PDF sampler from this book.

"The most unusual thing about Maria Baranda's dazzling accomplishment as a poet is that her most recent books are her very best ones. She keeps honing one of the most expressive lyricisms in contemporary Mexican poetry. Her complex prosody—the pitch and tempo rising in plangent cadences that break into sharp, percussive counterpoint—are here, in the poignant, sea-haunted book length poem Ficticia, at their best. And Joshua Edwards, a supremely gifted poet himself, brings out the full force of Baranda's music."—Forrest Gander

"María Baranda is one of the finest poets of her generation, those born in the 1960s, her work demonstrates adherence to the Mexican and Hispano-American tradition—that of the long meditative poem, with sinuous syntax and rich diction—with the not so frequent capacity for conceptual synthesis and precision of imagery and metaphor." —José María Espinasa

"María Baranda is today one of our country's necessary poets. During the past twenty years she has been able to start a conversation between recent Mexican lyric poetry and its predecessors: from the great pre-Hispanic poets to the those who in the 1960s changed the course of poetry in Mexico and in Latin America. María Baranda watches and listens. Her poetic speech passes through the senses before becoming language; it is this that gives her verses their spellbinding quality." —Eduardo Hurtado

UK trade orders via Bertrams Books or Gardners Books.
US trade orders via Ingrams or Baker & Taylor.
Please support your local bookshop by ordering Shearsman titles from them. If you prefer to order online, use the following links:
Order from the Shearsman online store
Order from amazon.co.uk
Order from The Book Depository
Order from amazon.com
Order from Barnes and Noble.com (USA)
Order from Small Press Distribution

The Room

The Room

for Maria Baranda

She assented so quickly
to undress you, you hoped
the person you seemed to be

would hold her, and be
loved, and turn to the wall,
blow out, as she requested,

the candle, to darken
all shapes in the room
and those within the window,

her darkness, eyes,
the light she felt then
blindly, it was something

gathered deeply, in you, as
simply your being and hers,
and a wellspring so insistent,

yet of the world apprehensive, when,
while she slept, the wall
paintings approached too near

and spread then
within you, as she
darkened, faded, and

your true life was
benighted, enormous, rare,
bathed in time, and ending

or not ending, when, at that
time, you lost her, being
your right, and that was awful.

She undressed to sleep,
reversed your life,
spared nothing,

it is now forever
all. She knows
it is gone, but you

insisted as you wept
and departed, no
longer empty, that here

by your remaining
when all’s attained,
a darkness comes

of the night rising
and final evenings
in the room.

-Paul Hoover

A Thousand Buddhas: Hong Kong

I Traveled to Hong Kong last week for an international poetry conference. Among those invited by conference organizer Bei Dao were Regis Bonvicino of Sao Paulo, Maria Baranda of Mexico City, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko of St. Petersburg, Russia, Tomaz Salamun of Slovenia, C.D. Wright of Providence, Rhode Island, Bejan Matur of Turkey, Paul Muldoon of Ireland and Princeton, Vivek Narayanan of India, Silke Scheuermann of Germany, and Xi Chuan of Beijing, who has a book coming out from New Directions in English translation. Also present were Yuan Jian of Yunnan and Yao Feng of Macao, whom I'd met on a trip to Yunnan in 2005. One afternoon, Maria and I encountered these figures at the nearby Thousand Buddhas Temple.

Ficticia by Maria Baranda

Recently available at www.spdbooks.org: Ficticia. Price: $15.00. Pages: 80 Poetry. Translated by from the Spanish by Joshua Edwards. FICTICIA was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of "Letters to Robinson," and a "Sky Cycle." While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.

Author Hometown: Mexico City MEX