Kirjahaku

"This magnificent selection from two decades of work by Victor Rodriguez Nunez confirms his pivotal position in international poetry. Dissolving fixed identities and formal limitations alike, the mercurial spaces of these poems reveal multiple selves, elliptical journeys and a passionate attention to everyday sensory experience. This is Cuban poetry energized by transcultural encounters, while two vital language currents of the Americas, Spanish and English, meet in Katherine Hedeen's scintillating translations. As 'rebel matter', these are poems that engage with the world in its elements - molten, fluid and restless. They invite the reader to tune in to new frequencies, not just to the sonic pleasures of language, but also to the lively matter of a universe beyond the human, its squirrels, asphalt, dust clouds and stars. Poetry's imaginative potential, Rodriguez Nunez reminds us, generates forms of dialogue that are more urgent now than ever: 'there won't be revolution / if we don't let night speak'." -Zoe Skoulding

Victor Rodriguez Nunez is one of today's most outstanding Cuban writers, although he has lived and worked outside of the island for nearly two decades, first in Nicaragua and Colombia and, since 1995, in the USA. The present collection, based on his selected poems "With a Strange Scent of World: First Anthology, 1978-1998" (Havana, 2004), offers a representative sample, as well as a rewriting, of his early poetic work.In an interview, Nunez described his search for 'a poetry that is ...participatory yet not political ...communicative yet not explicit...dialogic yet not conversational, Cuban yet not essentially nationalist...' and in her introduction to this volume, Katherine Hedeen provides us with background detail that helps to set the poet's work in context. In this first of Nunez's books to appear in English (in Katherine Hedeen's skilful translation), we see poems that are at once committed and experimental, where every limit is challenged, and where emotion and lucidity come together.

Victor Rodriguez Nunez is one of today's most outstanding Cuban writers, although he has lived and worked outside of the island for nearly two decades, first in Nicaragua and Colombia and, since 1995, in the USA. The present collection, based on his selected poems "With a Strange Scent of World: First Anthology, 1978-1998" (Havana, 2004), offers a representative sample, as well as a rewriting, of his early poetic work, full of vivid images from the poet's youth and of both rural and urban Cuba.In an interview, Nunez described his search for 'a poetry that is...participatory yet not political...communicative yet not explicit...dialogic yet not conversational, Cuban yet not essentially nationalist...' and in her introduction to this volume, Katherine Hedeen provides us with background detail that helps to set the poet's work in context. In this first of Nunez's books to appear in English (in Katherine Hedeen's skilful translation), we see poems that are at once committed and experimental, where every limit is challenged, and where emotion and lucidity come together.

Thaw is a book length sequence of short (all 10 lines long) poems. At first glance these seem simple meditations on nature, that, when given time, open out into larger reflections on human experience, emotions and how the three interact. They shine as small gifts of visions or place that envelop the reader with their sensuous immediacy. Nunez enjoys playing with symbols, allowing images to break out to offer intellectual puzzles and literary references. As such the poems dance between literal metaphorical and physical worlds, upending what you may have previously perceived or thought. A rich and peculiar sequence that is both shadowy and illuminating, tender and insistent, broad and deeply personal.