Search results for ""Author Homero Aridjis""

"Eyes To See Otherwise" is the first extensive selection of poems by leading Mexican poet Homero Aridjis to appear in English. The range and quality of the translations, by some of America's finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. W.S. Merwin writes, "In his early books, it was immediately clear that Homero Aridjis was a poet of great vitality and originality ...[his] range grew with astonishing vigour in one book after another ...Poems of his have been published in English translation for decades but it is more than time to have a large, widely representative selection of his poems available in English". Charles Tomlinson recalls, "When I first met Homero Aridjis, he was a youthful poet. He has carried that sense of youth with him throughout his life and it has left a mark on all his work. Born in a Mexican village, near which the monarch butterflies swarm yearly after their flight from Canada, he experienced early life in a profound relationship with the cycles of nature. This lies at the root of his two principal concerns, poetry and ecology. He not only writes of the whale, but has long fought for the protection of its breeding places in Baja California". Kenneth Rexroth calls him "a visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces". He adds, "These are words for a new "Magic Flute"".

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A book of cosmological surrealism in the tradition of Octavio Paz, Solar Poems is the first English translation of a single volume of poems by Mexico's famed poet-diplomat Homero Aridjis, exploring political consciousness as well as visionary psychological themes. President emeritus of International PEN, the prolific poet is Mexico's ambassador to UNESCO. Poemas solares (Solar Poems) was published in 2005. Translator George McWhirter won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Catalan Poems, the F.R. Scott Prize for Selected Poems of Jose Emilio Pacheco, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for his novel Cage. He is Vancouver's first Poet Laureate. "Homero Aridjis is a profoundly ecological poet who has put his fame and time where his principles are, fighting to save the monarch butterflies that winter by the billions in the mountains of his native Michoacan, the sea turtle that lays her eggs on Caribbean beaches, and the gray whale that calves in the lagoons of Baja California. Aridjis writes to the point, with an open eye and a sense of humor ..." --John Oliver Simon, Poetry Flash

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Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of poems written in and for the new century. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, migrant workers, Mexico’s oppressed, female saints, other writers (such as Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia), and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imaginary landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes: “a poem is like a door / we’ve never passed through...” And now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. “Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,” he writes, “I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same.”

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This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the written recollections and the memories that haunted the author’s father, Nicias Aridjis,—a captain in the Greek army, who returned from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles northwest of his hometown of Tire, in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days between September 13 and 22—known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and devastating the city—in particular, the Greek and Armenian quarters—by deliberately setting disastrous fires. After years of fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city’s past glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical, geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and depravity of the human soul. Making his way from district to district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming Turkish forces and irregulars who are randomly abusing and raping Greek and Armenian women and torturing and murdering their men. What he experiences is literally a living hell unfolding before his eyes. As Nicias passes familiar buildings, cafes, and churches, his mind and soul fill with nostalgia for his earlier life and the promise of love. Fortunately for the reader, the brutal and bloodthirsty scenes of the Smyrna Catastrophe are leavened by the voice of this “visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces,” as Kenneth Rexroth has described Aridjis. His portrayal of a genocide-in-progress floods our senses, turning these chaotic scenes into a poignant drama. At the very end, aboard one of the last ships to take refugees out of Smyrna before its final fall, Nicias scours the throng of thousands of desperate Greeks and Armenians pressing forward to escape on already overcrowded ships. Suddenly Turkish forces move in to shoot and stab, and, overwhelmed by the all-pervasive tragedy, Nicias abandons Smyrna and Asia Minor forever.

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