In the Vortex of the Cyclone: Selected Poems by Excilia Saldana - Hardcover

Excilia Saldana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813024595 ISBN 13: 9780813024592

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2002

Synopsis

The first-ever bilingual anthology by the Afro-Cuban poet Excilia Saldana contains a wide-ranging selection of her work, from lullabies to an erotic letter, from lengthy autobiographical poems to quiet reflections on her Caribbean island as the inspiration for her writing. She celebrates her African ancestry with poems that are filled with the flora and fauna of Afro-Cuban rituals. She explores her feminine rites of passage in the context of her country's momentous journey. In these poems, Saldana weaves the personal, the mythical, and the literary, bringing together the domestic with the transcendental, the temporal with the eternal. Known in Cuba as a poet, essayist, translator, and professor, Saldana won the prestigious Nicholas Guillen Award for Distinction in Poetry in 1998 and the La Rosa Blanca Prize for La Noche, a children's book, in 1989. Before her death in 1999, most of her work had appeared in Spanish exclusively in Cuba with only scattered translations. This collection emphasizes her construction of a personal and poetic autobiography to reveal the identity of one of the best Afro-Caribbean poets of the twentieth century.

About this title

Review

A wonderful book, strong, with enormous energy, fast-paced, truly poetic, with a varied and rich vocabulary ranging from the vernacular to the exalted. This is poetry to be said aloud, sometimes chanted, sometimes shouted, sometimes sung... a book that is both original and significant. - Cola Franzen, translator of Horses in the Air and Other Poems, by Jorge Guillen

About the Author

Flora Gonzalez Mandri is associate professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College, Boston. She is the author of Jose Donoso's House of Fiction: A Dramatic Construction of Time and Place and of several articles on Africana literature and the arts. Rosamond Rosenmeier is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of a book of poetry, Lines Out, and of Anne Bradstreet Revisited.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0813024595
• ISBN 13: 9780813024592
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 125