 |
Biographical note: EDUARDO CHIRINOS (Lima, Peru, 1960), an internationally acclaimed voice in Latin American letters, is the author of sixteen books of poetry as well as volumes of academic criticism, numerous essays, translations, and children’s books. His most recent poetry title, While the Wolf Is Around won the Generation of ’27 International Poetry Prize, Spain, 2010. He is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Montana.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844715213
ISBN: 9781844715213
Author: Eduardo Chirinos
Title: Reasons for Writing Poetry
Series: Earthworks
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: DCF
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 01-Feb-11
Extent: 184pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight: 276 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 9.99
Price: USD 15.95
Rights: World
|
|  See larger image PAPERBACK / SOFTBACK | |
Social networking links:
      
Short
description/annotation: Reasons for Writing Poetry is the first collection of verse to appear in English from the internationally acclaimed Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos. The poems, carefully chosen for this edition by the author and translator, reveal with simple eloquence how poetry may be written in today’s world.
Main description: Reasons for Writing Poetry is the first collection of verse to appear in English from the internationally acclaimed Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos (Lima, 1960). This selection of works, spanning nearly thirty years of poetic output, was carefully chosen for this edition by the author in collaboration with his long-time translator. Chirinos is well known in his native country and the author of sixteen books of poetry in addition to volumes of academic criticism, essays, translations, and children’s books. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, his work has been widely anthologized throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Several of Chirinos’s poems have appeared in literary journals in English translation.
The present volume charts the growth of a poet whose fondness for masks is manifest in the frequently dialogic, even polyvocal discourse of his work. Chirinos’s poetry is marked by a wry tone and simple lyric eloquence. Accessible, ironic, and always entertaining, the poems in Reasons for Writing Poetry treat time and again Chirinos’s favourite subjects and themes: the return to childhood, the vagaries of memory, the alternative reality of dream, a fascination with animals, the utility of seeing and hearing, the writer’s place in poetic tradition, and the never-ending search for originality through innovative expression.
Table of contents:
“No, the Sphinx Doesn’t Want an Answer”: The Poetics of Eduardo Chirinos
from The Notebooks of Horacio Morell
Beatus Ille (Natural History)
A Poem for Groucho, the One with the Moustache
The Giraffe and Bus Derby
from Chronicles of a Man of Leisure
The Dead Rocks
Free Version of the Stanzas the Young Ali-Nur Recited Before Kutait the Gaoler…
from Fingerprint File
Food for Fire
A Hot Wind Blows Over Desert Dunes
Like the Ice of a Dark Passion
(Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream)
from The Book of Encounters
Childhood Revisited
(Corrales, Tumbes 1965)
The Best of the Poets of Rome
from Rituals of Knowledge and Dream
Cassandra’s Monologue
Tiresias Speaks
Sermon on Death
from Songs of the Ark’s Blacksmith
Songs of the Ark’s Blacksmith
Films
Sea Stories
Russian Legends
Three Domestic Poems
Winter Lamps
Christmas in Bavaria, 1986
The Dream Is Over
Lima Revisited
from Remember, Body…
The Conch and the Rose
Love and the Sea
The Fable of Ophelia and Segismund
Pirate of Memory
from The Bayard Street Tightrope Walker
The Bayard Street Tightrope Walker
Raritan Blues
The Raccoons in Johnson Park
Ithaca
River Rabbits
Paterson
Autumn’s Defeat
Dream of Sirens
The Rain
How Poems Die
Central Park
from The Water’s ABC’s
Rats & Mice
Scrawling Crows
The Carousel in Recreation Park
The Sound of the Susquehanna
Just an Average Dog
Reasons for Writing Poetry
The Millennium Is Coming to an End
Monologue of Poet and Muse
from A Brief History of Music
Dance of the Wind
(Anonymous. Berbérie, c. 1300)
Brandenburgische Konzert N° 2
Winter
(The Four Seasons)
Für Elise
Grande Valse Brillante
Night on Bald Mountain
Russian Easter Festival Overture
Le Carnaval des Animaux
Gnossiennes
Daughters of the Lonesome Isle
from Written in Missoula
Poet’s House
Buffalo
The St. Ignatius Indian Mission
(Montana, 1854)
The Color of Nightfall
Mortally Wounded Okapi
Bears
The Cat and the Moon
To Reach Missoula
from The Faker
An Afternoon in the Prado Museum
The Cemetery
from No Nightingales on My Finger
Seven-Line Poem
Blank Sheets
With My Shadowy Mouth
Not Even Hands
Dry Leaves, Snow
La Solitudine
Horacio Morell
No Nightingales on My Finger
from The Smoke of Distant Fires
A Theory of Sight After a Poem by Seferis
The Book of My Life or My Conversations with Saint Teresa of Ávila
Putting My Library in Order Before Bedtime
Letters that Arrive without Fanfare
Notes
View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (104 KB)
Excerpt from book:
The Giraffe and Bus Derby
So we spend all our time circling a shoe-print,
galloping along on a giraffe’s back,
crashing into our own circumstances
and brandishing swords that might be radio antennae
or second-hand golf clubs.
Sometimes we sleep long owl nights
atop rocks that butt into the game,
opening the doors of our Swiss chalet to piss in the lake
and feed the giraffe as a reward for its benevolence.
Other times we prefer to retire without sleeping
and peruse some atlas, animal volume or book of poems,
looking a great deal like the clown in the Easter parade.
To break from routine you stand on your head
and look up the hardest word in the dictionary,
sticking your legs out the tallest building’s top-floor window
and shouting it out
(all the while securing the saddle on your giraffe
in case people finally understand you
and you have to fly off to strange lands where you’re not known).
If you are prevented from doing this,
you simply draw your face in the middle of the road
and make the cars swerve by brandishing a toy pistol.
But
should you emerge victorious this way
you will continue circling the shoe-print
or will have to set off on a trip.
So it is that the saddest thing in the world is having no name
to scribble on the back seat of the bus you’re traveling on.
Unpublished endorsement: One of the most outstanding Latin American poets of the last thirty years. José Miguel Oviedo, author of Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana Unpublished endorsement: …contemporary, minimalist, and seductively expressive… Eduardo Milán and Ernesto Lumbreras, editors of Prístina y última piedra: Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana presente |
|
Contact
us