Description
Book SynopsisA debut poetry collection that draws on the music and culture of flamenco to explore diasporic experience.
In Seguiriyas—which derives its title from the flamenco palo (or “song form”) of the same name—Ben Meyerson picks paths through the reverberations of diaspora, displacement, and transit. Meyerson's poems travel between his upbringing in an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Toronto and his time spent plumbing the historical tensions that animate Andalusian culture. Within diaspora and dispersion, Meyerson assembles an array of reference points ranging from the history of the Roma in Spain, flamenco performance, medieval Iberian poetry, rock music, and the echoes of Jewish ritual practice. Seguiriyas does not seek to neatly arrange the pluralities that it observes; rather, it moves in their wake, offering a form of careful attention and vibrant song.
Trade Review“
Seguiriyas’s magnificent lyricism and philosophy of self and history rests on this poet’s deep experience of Spain and knowledge of its rich past of splendid meetings, brutal divorces, brilliant and tragic memories, profound and troubling idealizations, marvelous traditions of song and poetry. Equally, the collection rises from the poet’s life—our own lives—in this world of ours, here today, this latest layer of inscription on an oft-captured-and-carved-over stone. The poems in their immediate appeal—emotion, vividly inventive description, plangent eloquence, moving simplicity, phrase-making, and image-making power—contain a network of connections adequate to the web of history itself and to the dialogic relationship of each human person to history through their place.
Seguiriyas is a book of depth, wide-eyed mourning, and the dream: ‘If still it is not revealed— // wait. // The voice will fill you, find you.’”—A.F. Moritz
