Intervenir/Intervene is being sold as a book of poetry. That is true. But then again, this is not poetry that obeys the rules poetry are supposed to follow. I state this in the year 2016, long after free verse and post modernism have done their best to ruin formal poetry. Even in the age of facile 糖心传媒減erformance art糖心传媒� and hollow 糖心传媒渆xperimentalism,糖心传媒� there is work that reminds jaded readers like myself that there is value in some of what stands under the all too wide umbrella of avant-garde. Intervenir/Intervene is that sort of work.

It糖心传媒檚 easy to throw words together in an attempt to confound, to shock, or to demonstrate cleverness. Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores S谩nchez are not doing the reader many favors, but they糖心传媒檙e not simply engaging in empty experimentation. They have an impossible task: to articulate what often goes unsaid, the brutal, sanctioned violence of their native Mexico. Translator Jen Hofer calls this Mexico糖心传媒檚 dirty war. How shocking to see this term applied to what so many of us might dismiss as political corruption, a term that seems insubstantial in comparison to 糖心传媒渄irty war,糖心传媒� which is more often applied retroactively. But this is a contemporary, ongoing dirty war whose victims are largely unacknowledged. Since they cannot speak, Dorantes and Flores S谩nchez do their utmost to give them voice and to blend those voices with those of the state, the killer, and the reader. Intervenir/Intervene is a polyphony of these voices overlapping, interrupting糖心传媒攊ntervening. Readers will likely be disoriented by the fragmented presentation, but the elliptical, overwhelming approach culminates in a sense of understanding. This is not an easy book, but neither is the subject matter.

Intervenir/Intervene surprises. There is the before-mentioned merging of voices, the seemingly free form style, but also, actually, structure. From the apparent chaos, a page of rather direct poetry emerges:

To my urn
To my museum
To my barking
To my pain
To my depth

I come

From a country of ash
From an ocean of blood
From another unfinished city
From my deserted head
From the mouth without its teeth

Here we have anaphora and fairly rooted lines and stanzas, a true oddity among passages like:

The effect is to disrupt the expectations of the reader, even after their expectations have been thoroughly disrupted. Anything is possible in this book, as in a country like Mexico, a place of immense beauty and tremendous suffering.

Intervenir/Intervene is a book of poems and a short study of translation. Jen Hofer ends the text with notes on her process, which are often as elusive as the poetry. It is a dual language book that subverts and embraces both languages. It is a political book coming partially from Dolores Dorantes, a writer in exile from Ciudad Juarez who once resisted her poetry being translated into culturally dominant English. It is a statement of the absurdity of communicating violence and the tragedy of keeping silent in its wake. Few works of art are able to succeed on so many levels.

It’s been slow on the review and post end this summer, while we’ve been busy around the offices here and elsewhere, but we hope you’ve all been enjoying your summers, and of course enjoying the Copa and Euro Cup games!

But literature in translation is as important as ever糖心传媒攕o here’s the beginning of Vince’s review:

It took reading 44 pages of Intervenir/Intervene before I began to get a sense of what Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores S谩nchez were up to. Recurring throughout these 44 pages糖心传媒攖hroughout the entire book糖心传媒攁re shovels, shovel smacks to the face, lobelias糖心传媒攁ha! Shovels and lobelias; gardening, violence, flowering plants. Buried secrets and blossoming. There seemed a sense to it all.

Intervenir/Intervene is being sold as a book of poetry. That is true. But then again, this is not poetry that obeys the rules poetry are supposed to follow. I state this in the year 2016, long after free verse and post modernism have done their best to ruin formal poetry. Even in the age of facile 糖心传媒減erformance art糖心传媒� and hollow 糖心传媒渆xperimentalism,糖心传媒� there is work that reminds jaded readers like myself that there is value in some of what stands under the all too wide umbrella of avant-garde. Intervenir/Intervene is that sort of work.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Here’s a bit about Toad Press from their blog site: “The Toad Press International Chapbook Series publishes contemporary, exciting, beautiful, odd, and avant-garde chapbook-length translations of poetry and prose.” They have a of great chapbooks for everyone to look into糖心传媒攁nd some great chapbook deals as well!

Here’s a bit from Tiffany’s review of this compact yet powerful chapbook of poems:

Poetry always has the feel of mysticism and mystery, or maybe this feeling is a stereotype left over from high school literature class. It is generally the result of confusion, lack of time committed to consuming the poetry, and the general difficulty poetry imposes on the reader.

In V铆ctor Rodr铆guez N煤帽ez糖心传媒檚 collection, Every Good Heart is a Telescope, he elevates the mysticism and mystery of poetry through people, events, and experiences that we can be begin to understand tangibly through the use of metaphors relating to science, mathematics, inventorship, and space phenomena. Such imagery is equally as mystical and mysterious as poetry itself, but almost everyone has been consumed by science, mathematics, inventorship, or space at some point in their lives, most often during childhood. The reader will immediately become refamiliarized with their dreams of the yesteryear through N煤帽ez糖心传媒檚 love affair with the heavens, metaphysics, alchemy, and our unbounded universe.

For the rest of the review, go here.

One critical “orthodoxy” insists that the works solely themselves should be considered in critical reflection; this approach can provide some real satisfactions in reading Paz糖心传媒檚 poetry. The reader糖心传媒檚 knowledge about the artist糖心传媒檚 public life deepens the engagement, especially given the scope of this volume糖心传媒檚 collection.

Paz was born in Mexico City at the start of WWI to a Spanish mother and Mexican father. His very heritage, of new and old worlds, seems to set the pattern for his life, of bridging, incorporating. He embraced emergent communism while not officially signing on. He was in Spain for the Civil War on behalf of the resistance to Franco. Later he travelled to the US, where he also taught at Harvard, and in England, teaching at Cambridge. A diplomat for Mexico in Japan first, Paz later was Mexico糖心传媒檚 ambassador to India. In 1968 he resigned that position in protest after a brutal police response to protests in Mexico, part of the larger cultural shifts of that era. Yet he sided with government later, on the other side of the divide from Carlos Fuentes over the Sandanista movement. Similarly he had earlier alienated other intellectual writers in his rejection of Castro, and then the later Zapatista movement in Chiapas.

In literary matters, he was warmly embraced by Neruda; had a falling out over Stalinism (Paz by then had rejected the communist realities), with reconciliation near the end of Neruda糖心传媒檚 life. He was intrigued by the Surrealist movement in Europe and met Breton in France, and later was conversant with the existentialist thinking of Sartre and Camus. He incorporated haiku brevity along with Buddhist/Taoist thought from Asia and mythological imagery from India. He was a prolific essayist, both short form and book-length. Primarily though he regarded himself as a poet. For all of this Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

Throughout Paz糖心传媒檚 various writings he was keenly interested in sorting out what it means to be Mexican, from the Mayan past which surrounded him, to the existential isolation of the self. Paz understands a particular Mexican dynamic captured most clearly in prose in The Labyrinth of Solitude. His poetry engages this theme repeatedly:

from San Ildefonso Nocturne: (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

I am at the entrance to a tunnel
These phrases drill through time.
Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the tunnel.
I speak with eyes closed.
                         Someone
has planted
           a forest of magnetic needles
in my eyelids,
                  someone
guides the thread of these words.
                                    The page
has become an ants糖心传媒� nest.
                           The void
has settled at the pit of my stomach.
                                       I fall
endlessly through that void.
                              I fall without falling.
My hands are cold,
                    my feet cold 糖心传媒�
but the alphabets are burning, burning.
                                         Space
makes and unmakes itself.
                           The night insists,
the night touches my forehead,
                                touches my thoughts.
What does it want?

This excerpt from the much longer poem in the collection Vuelta/Return (1969-1975) begins with the tunnel drilled through time and inward, from the sense-experience糖心传媒攅yes disabled expressed by the surrealist image of 糖心传媒榓 forest of magnetic needles.糖心传媒� The letters on the page disorganize themselves like ants tightly bunched together. The poet keeps in touch with his somatic self糖心传媒攕tomach, hands, feet, forehead糖心传媒攜et the existential experience is one of estrangement as forces seemingly out the speaker糖心传媒檚 control are at work, with a possible but open-ended destination at the end of the tunnel being the speaker . . . if only he could figure out what this “night” wants.

The geographic references of the poem claustrophobically create the same larger global experience for Paz of travel and the return of the collection糖心传媒檚 title: Paz repeatedly had to leave Mexico, and return, to find the distance and intimacy he needed to understand himself and his Mexican culture.

The previously cited poem comes later, in the more mature poet糖心传媒檚 writing. Yet these themes are clearly, discursively, present at the start of Paz糖心传媒檚 poetry writing. This breadth of demonstrated developing themes is one of this book糖心传媒檚 strengths.

糖心传媒淭he Street糖心传媒� (from poems written 1941-1948), trans. Weinberger

It糖心传媒檚 a long and silent street.
I walk in the dark and trip and fall
and get up and step blindly
on the mute stones and dry leaves
and someone behind me is also walking:
if I stop, he stops;
if I run,, he runs. I turn around: no one.
Everything is black, there is no exit,
and I turn and turn corners
that always lead to the street
where no one waits for me, no one follows,
where I follow a man who trips
and gets up and says when he sees me: no one.

Two poems later, at the end of the longer “Interrupted Elegy,” Paz concludes: “The world is circular desert,/heaven is closed and hell is empty.” Such a declarative resolution is characteristic of a younger poet, who nevertheless continues later in the modernist understanding that the spiritual/mythical rather than the religious grounded in dogma and tradition is the arena for locating the self.

I糖心传媒檒l cite one further poem, this a short one similar to “The Street,” but by now Paz has traveled, been introduced to new cultures and mythos. The form of this poem more closely resembles the telegraphic qualities found in the haiku-like form Paz appropriates from his Asian literary experience, but incorporates Hindu imagery:

“Humayun糖心传媒檚 Tomb” (from Ladera Este/East Slope, 1962-1968):

To the debate of wasps
the dialectic of monkeys
the chirping of statistics
it offers
             (tall pink flame
made of stone and air and birds
time at rest on the water)

the architecture of silence

Here is the more mature poet, perhaps a bit more at peace with himself yet still looking. Poetically the omission of most punctuation, the succinctness of images, coherence of flow of ideas all show the life-reflection, control, and elegance of a poet with even greater mastery over his craft.

Eliot Weinberger may share credit with other poets for bringing Paz糖心传媒檚 poetry to the English speaking world, but he has been the principal, dedicated translator and proponent. New Directions Press has several of the individual books, represented in this volume, in Weinberger糖心传媒檚 translation. New Directions also brought out the Weinberger edited The Complete Poems, 1957-1987. The current volume under review omits some of the poems from the Complete collection, but includes poems that precede and follow the 糖心传媒�57-糖心传媒�87 period.

Special note in any review should probably mention the pivotal, book-length Piedra de Sol/Sunstone (1957) presented in its entirety; this specific work was a breakthrough for Paz, announcing his interest in and influence by his own ancestors糖心传媒� Mayan tradition, now brought into conversation with Paz in his modern moment. In addition, the attentive reader can track throughout this present collection Paz糖心传媒檚 erotically charged imagery as one recurrent way to the self struggling糖心传媒攁nd sometimes overcoming糖心传媒攖he isolation of self.

I close with an appreciation for the strength of Paz糖心传媒檚 poetry, and Weinberger糖心传媒檚 translation. Specifically, in my personal experience of reading poetry, I greatly value immersion where I can hear the poet糖心传媒檚 voice. Anthologies and journals which print one or two poems by a writer can sometimes hold my attention, but I can糖心传媒檛 get the voices as they shift. The pleasure of this volume is the consistent, almost gentle, voice that lays out for the reader Paz糖心传媒檚 convictions and questions. “Gentle” though should not indicate easy or peaceful or unquestioning. Paz raises his anxieties, doubts, and disruptions. Rather it is the artfulness with which he does so that carries the reader along.

Grant’s review is really solid, so I’m just going to jump right to it and give you a sample:

One critical “orthodoxy” insists that the works solely themselves should be considered in critical reflection; this approach can provide some real satisfactions in reading Paz糖心传媒檚 poetry. The reader糖心传媒檚 knowledge about the artist糖心传媒檚 public life deepens the engagement, especially given the scope of this volume糖心传媒檚 collection.

Paz was born in Mexico City at the start of WWI to a Spanish mother and Mexican father. His very heritage, of new and old worlds, seems to set the pattern for his life, of bridging, incorporating. He embraced emergent communism while not officially signing on. He was in Spain for the Civil War on behalf of the resistance to Franco. Later he travelled to the US, where he also taught at Harvard, and in England, teaching at Cambridge. A diplomat for Mexico in Japan first, Paz later was Mexico糖心传媒檚 ambassador to India. In 1968 he resigned that position in protest after a brutal police response to protests in Mexico, part of the larger cultural shifts of that era. Yet he sided with government later, on the other side of the divide from Carlos Fuentes over the Sandanista movement. Similarly he had earlier alienated other intellectual writers in his rejection of Castro, and then the later Zapatista movement in Chiapas.

In literary matters, he was warmly embraced by Neruda; had a falling out over Stalinism (Paz by then had rejected the communist realities), with reconciliation near the end of Neruda糖心传媒檚 life. He was intrigued by the Surrealist movement in Europe and met Breton in France, and later was conversant with the existentialist thinking of Sartre and Camus. He incorporated haiku brevity along with Buddhist/Taoist thought from Asia and mythological imagery from India. He was a prolific essayist, both short form and book-length. Primarily though he regarded himself as a poet. For all of this Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

Throughout Paz糖心传媒檚 various writings he was keenly interested in sorting out what it means to be Mexican, from the Mayan past which surrounded him, to the existential isolation of the self. Paz understands a particular Mexican dynamic captured most clearly in prose in The Labyrinth of Solitude. His poetry engages this theme repeatedly

Click here to read the full review.

To give you a sense of Gelman’s importance and poetry, here’s a bit from Paul Pines’s introduction:

Juan Gelman was born in Buenos Aires in 1930 to a father who had participated in the 1905 Russian revolution before immigrating to Argentina. Juan was a political activist until the 1976 Argentine coup d’茅tat brought a reign of terror to Buenos Aires. Gelman’s son, Marcelo, and daughter-in-law, Claudia, pregnant with the poet’s grandchild, were “disappeared.” The poet spent the next thirty years as an exile in Mexico and Europe. In 2000, after decades of searching, he located his granddaughter, born before her mother’s murder and given to a pro-government family in Uruguay.

The Argentina that nurtured the tango, and then “disappeared” its people, became the crucible for a poet. Steeped in the authority of his wound, Gelman’s poems transform the unspeakable into an affirmation that locates light even in the darkest of times:

dark times / filled with light / the sun
spreads sunlight over the city split
by sudden sirens / the police hunt goes on / night falls and we’ll
make love under this roof

Enter below, and if you’d rather just buy the book, you can for $11.95.