A Fountain, a House of Stone: Poems

A Fountain, a House of Stone is a bilingual collection of poems by Cuba’s foremost living poet, Herbert Padilla, who now lives in exile in the United States. Padilla’s poems constitute a subtle but powerful poetry of domesticity in exile, in which his characteristically questioning, critical poetics have been not so much abandoned as subsumed. His lyricism here finds its inspiration largely in the quotidian, but the same meditative lyric intelligence infuses his homages to a host of poetic muses—to Jose Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, Heinrich Heine, Luis Cernuda, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens, among others. These poems give fierce and stirring testimony to a poet finding a new being in the recreation of a lost world.