Author Description

<p>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.</p> <p>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."</p> <p>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."</p>