Synopses & Reviews
Birds for a Demolition brings the vivid, surreal poetry of one of Brazil's most celebrated living poets into English for the first time.
Review
Birds for a Demolition serves up a generous helping of poetry by the irresistible Manoel de Barros, an aphoristic prankster dedicated to "striving for vegetable wisdom." His is a world in which "a frog swigs the sunrise" and death "weeds its way" into a prison cell. "A poem is an un-utensil," he declares--but there is much more than simple high jinks beneath his idiosyncratic ways of seeing and saying. And Idra Novey brilliantly recreates both the spirit and substance of these poems, in language as bold and buoyant as the original.
--Ellen Dore Watson
Review
The Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros has reinvented the Orphic task of the poet in these short, surreal, incandescent lyrics that stick close to the natural world, that make a pact with stones and birds, that celebrate "the Grandeurs of the Lowly." Idra Novey has done us a genuine service by bringing into English these late modern poems that "memorialize the poor things of the ground" and sing the world.
--Edward Hirsch
About the Author
Manoel De Barros, author of more than twenty collections of poetry, was born in the wetlands region of Brazil known as the Pantanal in 1916. He has received Brazil's highest awards for poetry multiple times: the Jabuti Prize in both 1990 and 2002, the Nestle Poetry Prize in 1997 and 2006, and the Ministry of Culture's Cecilia Meireles Prize in 1998. His unusual life and work were the subject of Joel Pizzini's 1989 film O Caramujo Flor. Idra Novey's first collection of poems, The Next Country, was published in 2008. A book of her translations of poet Paulo Henriques Britto, The Clean Shirt of It, received a PEN Translation Fund Award and was published in 2007. She teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where she is the director of Columbia's Center for Literary Translation.