In the Vortex of the Cyclone: Selected Poems

by Excilia Saldaña, FLORA M. GONZALEZ-MANDRI (Editor), Rosamond Rosenmeier (Editor)

"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 "A much-needed contribution to Afro-Cuban and Caribbean studies."--Vera M. Kutzinski, Yale University 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.
Foreword by Nancy Morejon  
Introduction by Flora Gonzalez Mandri  
Anonymous Landscape  
The Wife's Monologue  
Through the Looking Glass  
Lullaby for an Elephant Out for a Stroll, Lullaby for the Child-Cosmos, Lullaby for My Naughty Child, Lullaby for the Missing Daughter  
I'm Thirsty, Grandmother  
My Faithful One  
My Name (A Family Anti-Elegy)  
Unfinished Danzon for Night and Island  
Afterword by Cintio Vitier    Flora Gonzalez Mandri is associate professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College, Boston. Rosamond Rosenmeier is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Genres: Poetry, Love

144 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 2002

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tell me,
with what splinter of mirror,
granule of clay,
touch of my finger
or magical sigh,
with what fragment of dream,
whisper of ant,
berry of fire, or iota of pollen,
with what
flight's little sip, what
bubble of music,
what harmony of
echo, point without
end, what spark of time
or jot of nothing,

with what did I create you,

my child, my son,
my consummate cosmos?

[EIJANDOLUM]

“There is no hurry,
all eternity
fits.”

“All is solitude. All is silence.”


“I want your veins, your viscera, your muscles, your glands, your humors, your thoughts.
I want your passion.
And more.”

“Whoever you may be, whoever you may have been, whoever you may become, you are for me nothing more than a specter of the reincarnated body in my solitude, twin body to my shadow, the kind that the gods serve themselves and with which they challenge me in the enigma of this eternal night, the night in which I imagine your dream... When all is darkness and I enter into my own memory of memory.”

Raw. Visceral.