Selected Poems

June 1, 2001
Distinguished Cuban poet Pablo Armando Fernandez makes a meeting place for different cultures, for myth and history, for nationality and exile, for sorrow and pride in Parables: The Selected Poems, culled from his 40-year career and introduced by Margaret Atwood. Fernandez often alludes to biblical rhetoric and imagery as he gives precise descriptions of vague icons ("What the dead mouths say is that man/ came in the change of light") and sweeping political configurations ("Revolution,/ in the beginning are the words,/ heroic, it is difficult to tell the facts"). Though his work has been published in English-language periodicals like the New Left Review and Arts in Society, this is his first Spanish/English volume. Recipient of the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1996 for lifetime accomplishment, and formerly the Cultural Counselor to the Cuban Embassy in London, Fernandez has returned to Cuba.

November 1, 1987
Atwood is considered by many to be among Canada's finest writers, and her new collection should support that opinion. Thematically complex, her poetry is difficult to categorize: when she writes about Canada, as in "Four Small Elegies," she goes beyond a regional perspective; and though a feminist, she does not necessarily evoke pacifism. Violence, she discovers, is implicit in human nature, as shown in the snake poem "She": "He's our idea of a bad time, we are his./ I say he out of habit. It could be she. " Fatalistic and mordant, her diction may be post-modern but is neither experimental nor obscure. Ivan Arguelles, Univ. of California at Berkeley Lib.

Copyright 1987 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.