Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Clear, impassioned, brilliant. Beautiful." Richard Rayner
Review
"Cardenal shows his rarest talent -- the ability to love and be angry in one perfectly formed phrase." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Readers of English, thank your gods: the breadth of Ernesto Cardenal's amazing poetic career is now available for our consumption." George Wallace PEN American Center Blog Post
Review
"Highly recommended for all libraries and could be used as a text for courses in multicultural and ethnic studies." Vincent Francone Three Percent
Review
"Ernesto Cardenal is a major epic-historical poet, in the grand lineage of Central American prophet Rubén Darío." Alva V. Cellini MultiCultural Review
Review
"A worthy tribute to this living legend. The diversity of the work serves to enhance the overall experience." Allen Ginsberg
Review
"When Father Cardenal focuses upon Nicaragua as a land and a people, the detailed pictures he paints express passionate devotion." Joseph D. Haske American Book Review
Synopsis
Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems charts the life-work of the celebrated poet Ernesto Cardenal--"one of the world's major poets" (Choice) and "the preeminent poet of Central America today" (Library Journal). Follow Cardenal's poetic development across six decades, from the early exteriorismo poems and romantic epigrams of the early 1950s, to the increasingly spiritual and political verse he wrote as priest and activist (including his classic revolutionary documentary poem "Zero Hour") to the shorter victory and ecology poems, and elegies to fallen Sandinistas, and on to the cosmic-mystical-scientific dimensions of his later work. "Here they are--" editor Jonathan Cohen writes in his Introduction, "to gladden your heart and enrich your soul."
Synopsis
The most comprehensive selection of poems in English by Latin America's legendary poet-activist, Ernesto Cardenal.
About the Author
Ernesto Cardenal was born in 1925 in Granada, Nicaragua. Revolutionary activist, disciple of Thomas Merton, Roman Catholic priest, founder of the contemplative commune Our Lady of Solentiname, ambassador for the Sandinistas, Minister of Culture in post-Somoza Nicaragua, and co-founder of the international cultural center House of Three Worlds, Cardenal, on his eightieth birthday, was given the nation's highest cultural honor, the Order of Rubén Darío, by President Enrique Bolaños in 2005. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and scholar of inter-American literature. He edited the New Directions anthology of Ernesto Cardenal's poetry, Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems. Scholarly works include A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee and Neruda in English: A Critical History of the Verse Translations and Their Impact on American Poetry.Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After receiving an A.B. degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a stint in the Navy during World War II, and after working in the mail room at Time Magazine and living in Paris where he received a Doctorat de l'Universite from the Sorbonne, Ferlinghetti eventually settled in San Francisco, where he and Peter D. Martin founded the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, City Lights Books. Besides being named San Francisco's first poet laureate, he has received The Before Columbus Foundation "Lifetime Achievement Award." Most recently he has also been writing a weekly column, "Poetry as News," for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.