Poetry. Translation, a bilingual edition, Spanish/English. Lyrical contemporary work from preeminent Mexican poet and scholar, published for the first time in English. Haunting poems lift us past loss and fear, into the eye of God. Personal and political, reverential and numinous, this book knows that true mysticism is about questions, not answers. The search for lost loves, disappeared women, the author's place in Mexican history, a spiritual woman's relationship to the body all steep these pages with a passionate and often physical intensity rare in poetry today.
Says Jean Valentine, winner of the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award, and the 2017 Bollingen Prize, "Reading Image of Absence, how little I know, how deeply at home I feel in Clariond’s intimate strangeness, like finding again a deep friend from another life. I am grateful she offers, in absence, an overnight home place, or a half-hour refuge, waiting for us who wait. I don’t know Spanish, so my gratitude for Curtis Bauer’s translation, and for the blessing of his Translator’s Introduction, is boundless."
Bauer's fellow poet and translator, Rebecca Gayle Howell, adds: "In Image of Absence, Jeannette L. Clariond—the laureate of Mexico’s soul—takes H.D.’s hand and dives head first into the self-same sea which gave us Trilogy, that sea of treacherous silence wherein God’s name lives. With the courage only a mystic dares, Clariond breathes this water into her lungs so she might utter body, its absence; history, her absence; love, her ever-was, speaking sound into silence until it all becomes air. Of course, only the intrepid Curtis Bauer would be the one ready to travel with Clariond into this deep. We needed this book revealed to English; in this time of overwhelming American fear, I needed my chance to share in this uncommon prayer."
Jeannette L. Clariond (Chihuahua, Mexico, 1949) grew up between languages, which influenced how she looks at the world, her vision of reality and her poetics. A prolific poet and translator, she has won numerous awards and prizes for her poetry collections, including the Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta for the collection Deserted Memory; the Premio Nacional de Poesía Gonzalo Rojas for Everything Before Nightfall; her book Woman Turning Her Back was a finalist for the Premio Nacional de Poesía Ramón López Velarde; and Image of Silence was a finalist for the Premio Cope in Peru. In addition to her poetry, Ms. Clariond has translated more than twenty books of poetry by American and European authors, including Charles Wright, Primo Levi, Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Carson. Over the last twenty five years she has translated ten books by the Italian poet Alda Merini. In 2002 Ms. Clariond received a Conaculta Rockefeller Foundation grant for her translation of Charles Wright's Black Zodiac, and from 2000 to 2006 she worked with the acclaimed critic, Harold Bloom, at Yale University. During this time, she translated important poetic works from the United States and co-edited and subsequently published the anthology, The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of Contemporary North American Poetry; the book was awarded the Latino Book Award's Best Translation Prize in 2013. Ms. Clariond is a collaborating member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, which has branches in Washington and New York. She is currently translating Anne Carson's book Nox into Spanish.
Curtis Bauer is the author of two poetry collections: Fence Line, which won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, and The Real Cause for Your Absence. His translations include: Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio Gonzlez Iglesias; From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muoz; and Baghdad and Other Poems. His poems and translations have appeared in Tin House, the Southern Review, The Literary Review, World Literature Today, and The American Poetry Review. He is publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and Translations Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. He teaches Creative Writing, Comparative Literature, and Letterpress Printing at Texas Tech University.
