Customer Reviews

Poesia Selecta (Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage)

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Puerto Rican black poetry written by a white guy at it's best. Recite the verses to the Bomba rythm; highlight words and add some dramatic and sensual movements with your body and you'll see what I'm getting at.

Oddly enough, Palés Matos wasn't trying to write about black Puerto Ricans. He wished to create an awareness of the contrasting ethnicities and disproportionate economic levels in society during the early part of the 20th century.

You can see the bare feet dancing in the soil, smell the musk from Quembandumba's arms and see her body in contortions before you.

Get this book. Use it in drama and cultural activities.

Selected Poems/Poesia Selecta is a bilingual (English/Spanish) anthology showcase the poetry of the pre-eminent Latin American poet Luis Pales Matos. Ably translated by Julio Marzan, this Arte Publico Press edition will aptly serve to introduce a whole new generation to one of Puerto Rico's finest poets. The Well: My soul is like a well of deaf, deep water/on whose solemn, unrippled peace/days wheel, drowning their daily murmur; in the calm that curdles in barren hollows.//Below, the water lays its agony brightness,/a feeble iridescence fermenting in darkness;/lymphs that clot into long black slime/and exude this bloodless blue phosphorescence.//My soul is like a well. The sleepy water landscape/trembling composes itself and disperses,/while below, fathoms, perhaps a thousand years back,/dreams a crouched, misanthropic frog.//At times under the moon's long influence,/the well displays the misty magic of a fable:/a frog's deep croaking echoes in its water,/and it brims with a faint sense of eternity.