I just got a copy of this one, translated by my friend and mentor George McWhirter, who also edited (with Betty Ferber) Aridjis’s Eyes to See Otherwise (Ojos de otro mirar): Selected Poems 1960-2000 Aridjis is wonderful! And George is a sensitive and inventive translator, so I’m looking forward to reading it in Mexico come mid-April….

Herewith some encomiums from the back of the book:

“Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door into the light.”
—Seamus Heaney

“A visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces.”
—Kenneth Rexroth

“In the poetry of Homero Ardjis there is the gaze, the pulse of the poet . . . the discontinuous time of practical and rational life and the continuity of desire and death; there is the poet’s personal truth.”
—Octavio Paz

“A great flame passes through the words, the poetry of Homero Aridjis, who sets reality alight in images that at once illuminate and consume it, making life a sister of dream. Homero is a great poet; our century has great need of him.”
—Yves Bonnefoy

“The poetry of the distinguished Mexican poet and environmentalist, Homero Aridjis, in his new collection, Poemas Solares/Solar Poems, constantly serves up an exhilarating feast of wonderfully evocative images and metaphors that are also daring, cutting edge, full of surprises, often irreverent, historical, but sensual—even erotic—as in this passage from ‘The sacred couple’: ‘For some time now, I have been into dreaming about volcanoes./ In particular, the Valley of Mexico’s sacred couple./ He, with the white head and scratched eye; she, with the snowy crater and breasts erect.’ Aridjis’s poetry is full of love and a profound wonder for all of the universe and its inhabitants—humans, animals, the earth, the seas, the sky and the sun and moon. Poemas Solares/Solar Poems is a beautiful and necessary collection of poems by a wise poet at the peak of his powers.”
—Quincy Troupe, author of The Architecture of Language, Miles and Me and co-author with Miles Davis of Miles: The Autobiography