Details
Publication Date: 01-Feb-11 | ISBN: 9781844715213 | Trim Size: 216 x 140 mm | Extent: 184pp
Synopsis
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; ;
Praise For This Book
“One of the most outstanding Latin American poets of the last thirty years.” —José Miguel Oviedo, author of Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana
“…contemporary, minimalist, and seductively expressive…” —Eduardo Milán and Ernesto Lumbreras, editors of Prístina y última piedra: Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana presente
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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.
