Paz Octavio Collected Poems 1957 87

Contains almost 200 collected poems in both Spanish and English.

When Octavio Paz died, Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was a surrealist disciple of Andre Breton, an admiring imitator of Alexander Pope; now a radical experimentalist, now an autobiographer and confessional writer. European by inclination, he brought unanticipated tonalities into Spanish.

A collection of poems by Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, presented in Spanish and in English.

When Octavio Paz died, Mexico lost a tribe of writers. He was a surrealist disciple of Andre Breton, an admiring imitator of Alexander Pope; now a radical experimentalist, now an autobiographer and confessional writer. European by inclination, he brought unanticipated tonalities into Spanish.

Octavio Paz, the 1990 Nobel Laureate, has won distinction as an anthropologist, philosopher and critic of art and literature. But it is as a poet that he is most celebrated. Configurations was his first major collection to be published in this country, and includes in their entirety Sun Stone (1957) and Blanco (1967). Paz himself translated many of the poems from the Spanish. Some distinguished contributors to this bilingual edition include, among others, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and Muriel Rukeyser.

A Tree Within (Arbol Adentro), the first collection of new poems by the great Mexican author Octavio Paz since his Return (Vuelta) of 1975, was originally published as the final section of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. Among these later poems is a series of works dedicated to such artists as Miró, Balthus, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Tapies, Alechinsky, Monet, and Matta, as well as a number of epigrammatic and Chinese-like lyrics. Two remarkable long poems --"I Speak of the City," a Whitmanesque apocalyptic evocation of the contemporary urban nightmare, and "Letter of Testimony," a meditation on love and death--are emblematic of the mature poet in a prophetic voice.

"The growth of the work of Octavio Paz," writes Muriel Rukeyser in her preface to this bilingual selection of the Mexican poet's Early Poems, "has made clear to an audience in many languages what was evident from the beginning ... he is a great poet, a world-poet whom we need. The poems here speak--as does all his work since--deeply, erotically, with grave and passionate involvement." In this, a much revised edition of the earlier Selected Poems (Indiana University Press, 1963), Miss Rukeyser has joined to her own translations those of Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams, while many of the readings embody Paz's own revisions of the original texts. The poems were chosen from eight separate collections, among them Condición de nube ("Phase of Cloud"), Semillas para un himno ("Seeds for a Psalm"), Piedras sueltas ("Riprap"), and Estación violenta ("Violent Season").