The Republic of Poetry: Poems - Softcover

Espada, Martín

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393331407 ISBN 13: 9780393331400

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

Synopsis

The eighth collection by "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" (Sandra Cisneros) was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

In his eighth collection of poems, Martín Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Here poets return from the dead, visit in dreams, even rent a helicopter to drop poems on bookmarks.

About this title

About the Author:

Martín Espada is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Republic of Poetry and, most recently, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed. His many honors include the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

From Publishers Weekly:

Espada's compact, forceful follow-up to his well-received new-and-selected, Alabanza (2004), describes, in its three parts, three versions of his "republic." The first is Chile, where the Massachusetts-based, Brooklyn-bred poet has recently traveled, and where poets past and present (Neruda among them) reacted to the atrocities of the Pinochet dictatorship, hoping their verse could "make the soldiers/ vanish from the garden." The second "republic" unites the poets, from various lands, whom Espada has admired—the lately deceased Robert Creeley, the South African protest poet Dennis Brutus and all those who have used their verse to speak for social justice: "I want to write," Espada explains, "a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man." Finally, there is the American republic, heir to democratic ideals traduced or shattered (in Espada's view) by the current administration and its wars, though "Sometimes a song drifts up/ through.../ machine guns and sobbing." Espada (himself of Puerto Rican descent) remains one of the nation's best-known and most outspoken Latino poets. (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0393331407
• ISBN 13: 9780393331400
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 78