Authors: Roque Dalton, Rogue Dalton, Hardie St Martin
ISBN-13: 9781880684351, ISBN-10: 1880684357
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Date Published: September 1996
Edition: (Non-applicable)
"English-only edition of poems written from exile, prison, and on the run by the Salvadoran revolutionary whose life and word urged love as well as change. Selected from 10 of ...
Long overlooked in the U.S., Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935. He joined the Communist Party and became a guerrilla in the El Salvadoran revolution, producing a massive body of poems before being murdered in 1973. The early poems, those from a young revolutionary, are full of extravagance: "I have this wild itch to laugh/ or kill myself" and "I don't believe in angels/ but the moon is now dead for me." As Dalton's poetry matures, his imagination ranges, sometimes recklessly, running from line to line without regard for negative space or silence, but never without passion. "Man uses his old disasters like a mirror./ An hour or so after dusk/ the man picks up the painful remnants of his day/ and worried sick he puts them right next to his heart/ he sweats like a TB patient fighting for his life/ and sinks into his deep lonely rooms." Many of the poems written in exile in Mexico and Cuba are manly, wine-drinking montages of life on the Communist edge. In the section "Tavern and Other Places," he is at his best: creatively illuminating the soul of his home country; cataloguing with humility his experiences as a soldier; and musing over some of his prisonmates, soldiers, friends and countrymen. Here Dalton achieves a ripe, formal confidence in which meaning and expression are fully integrated. The final, wry poems punch small holes in bourgeois religion, politics and life. This is the most comprehensive and scholarly edition of Dalton's poetry available in English.(Sept.)
Preface: I Remember Roque, Ernesto Cardenal | ||
Preface: Roque Dalton: Poet and Revolutionary, Claribel Alegria | ||
Preface: Love Falls Like a Generous Rain, Hardie St. Martin | ||
Study with a Little Tedium | 2 | |
The Crazy Ones | 3 | |
Time for Ashes | 4 | |
Hating Love | 5 | |
Monday | 6 | |
My Horse | 8 | |
Listen | 9 | |
Poems-In-Law to Lisa | 11 | |
Dream Far Away from Time | 13 | |
Vernacular Elegy for Francisco Sorto | 15 | |
Minor Chorus of the Fifth Cell | 17 | |
The Decision | 20 | |
Island on the Fifth Floor | 21 | |
Storm | 22 | |
Stillborn Parable | 24 | |
The Bad Example | 25 | |
Because I Spoke Out | 26 | |
I See | 27 | |
Insomnia | 28 | |
The Disciple | 29 | |
The Tropics | 30 | |
Naked Woman | 31 | |
Maria Tecun | 32 | |
The Art of Poetry | 34 | |
Madrigal | 36 | |
Words in front of the Sea | 37 | |
The Sixth Commandment | 39 | |
What a Crazy Man Said to Me | 40 | |
Megalomania | 41 | |
The Pope | 42 | |
Old Woman with Small Boy | 43 | |
Another Dead Woman | 44 | |
Cesar Vallejo | 45 | |
Vanity | 46 | |
Small Hours of the Night | 47 | |
The Bureaucrats | 48 | |
Mariano the Musician Has Died | 49 | |
Epitaph | 50 | |
Terrible Thing | 51 | |
I Wanted | 52 | |
The Sea | 56 | |
Juan Cunjama, Sorcerer | 62 | |
Overlook | 64 | |
The Desert | 65 | |
Rite for the Birth of a Flower on the Great Pyramid | 66 | |
The Deer | 67 | |
Pine | 68 | |
Homage to Sage | 69 | |
Relative | 70 | |
My Country's Far Away | 72 | |
Forgetting | 74 | |
Middle Age | 75 | |
Leaves | 76 | |
Passing the Factory | 77 | |
Now You See Why | 78 | |
When Death | 79 | |
Tied Down to the Sea | 80 | |
I Remember When I'd Talk of Lisa | 82 | |
A Dead Girl in the Ocean | 83 | |
Memory | 84 | |
The Prodigal Son | 86 | |
German-American Hotel | 88 | |
Latin America | 98 | |
27 Years | 99 | |
Fear | 100 | |
Soldier's Rest | 101 | |
The Captain | 102 | |
In a Fit of Anger | 103 | |
The National Soul | 104 | |
The Law Enforcer | 105 | |
The Sure Hand of God | 106 | |
Sir Thomas | 112 | |
Samantha | 112 | |
Matthew | 113 | |
The Bishop | 113 | |
Lady Ann | 114 | |
The Firstborn | 114 | |
Sir Thomas | 115 | |
Matthew | 116 | |
Sir Thomas | 117 | |
Matthew | 118 | |
Samantha | 119 | |
Lady Ann | 120 | |
The Firstborn | 120 | |
Prison Again | 122 | |
Preparing the Next Hour | 123 | |
Independence Day | 125 | |
Summer | 126 | |
Your Company | 127 | |
I Smell Bad | 128 | |
Bad News on a Scrap of Newspaper | 129 | |
Permission to Wash Up | 130 | |
Some Longings | 131 | |
Number 357 | 132 | |
The Morning I Met My Father | 134 | |
The Young People | 138 | |
A Not Exactly Optimistic Tragedy | 139 | |
Springtime in Jevani |
Subjects
Poetry
Latin American & Caribbean Poetry Salvadoran poetry
Fiction Books & Literature Poetry Latin American & Caribbean Poetry
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