For the first time, a comprehensive Selected Poems in a bilingual edition, by Mexico's greatest living poet. Eyes to See Otherwise is the first extensive selection of poems by leading Mexican poet Homero Aridjis to appear in English. The scope and quality of the translations, by some of America's finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. Aridjis's sources range from Nahuatl chants and Huichol initiation songs to San Juan de la Cruz and the 16th-century Spanish poet Luis de Gangora y Argote. He is, in the words of translator George McWhirter, "a troubadour of love for lost environments, a voice in the wilderness of Mexico City and Mexico." Included in this selection are poems by Aridjis evoking his own life, present and past, his memories always sticking close to his birthplace Contepec, where, on Altamirano Hill, the Monarch butterflies arrive each year. This long awaited Selected Poems enables the reader to witness, from his 1960 collection The Eyes of a Double Vision to new unpublished poemsin a bilingual editionthe poetic and personal evolution of this "visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces" (Kenneth Rexroth). Translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Martha Black Jordan, Philip Lamantia, W.S. Merwin, John Frederick Nims, Kenneth Rexroth, Jerome Rothenberg, Brian Swann, Barbara Szerlip, Nathaniel Tarn, Eliot Weinberger, and the editors.

Eyes to See Otherwise: Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Ferber, Betty

McWhirter, George

ARIDJIS, HOMERO

Poetry

New Directions

George McWhirter grounds his delightful characters in the real, while his sharp wit and creative scenarios border on the fantastical: a woman adopts a dolphin-man; an Irish madam runs a railroad bordello in the desert; a devoted husband drives his childless, belly-dancing wife to Greek tavernas with the ambition to quicken their lagging fertility; a Kurdish barber has a cure for hair loss, but not the loss of his wife and family in Iraq; a Mexican campesino swears his machete-severed ear is a sea shell tuned to the Pacific Ocean. The Gift of Women is about religion and sexuality, the surreal and the magical, a tale-telling of earthy and incendiary women, capable of setting a man, a valley, and an entire island on fire.

The Gift of Women

Literary

Exile Editions

The Anachronicles is a collection of unusually rich poems that are both proto-and post-colonial. The title itself—melding the two words ’anachronism’and ’chronicle’—points to how the poems explore events and exchanges in one place from two points in time. The place itself is La Audiencia Beach in Mexico. Instead of portraying history from the present looking backwards, McWhirter has the past looking forward to foresee and comment on what is to happen as a result of the early exploration. Here Hernán Cort&#233s and his Lieutenant-Conqueror of Colima, Sandoval, appraise the antics of Bo Derek and other stars as they make the movie 10— on the same beach where four hundred years earlier their crews built three brigantines to explore what is now called the Sea of Cortez. The verse-logs then follow explorer Don Caamaño and his successors up the Pacific Coast to where John McKay (aka Sean McKoy), an Irishman, was left to recuperate from a sickness among the Nootka/Nuu-chah-nulth on Vancouver Island. The final poem, "Hops," retells the Irish legend of the goddess Liadan and the poet Cuirithir, whose voices travel to one another from Canada and Ireland. The dialogue travels from the end of the last millennium to the 1950s, highlighting their present-day divided Christian-pagan roles as mortal man and woman in holy orders.

The Anachronicles

Ronsdale Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McWhirter, George. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McWhirter, George