A Fountain, a House of Stone: Poems

by Heberto Padilla, Alastair Reid (Translator), Alexander Coleman (Translator)

A Fountain, a House of Stone is a bilingual collection of poems by Cuba’s foremost living poet, Herbert Padilla, who now lives in exile in the United States. Padilla’s poems constitute a subtle but powerful poetry of domesticity in exile, in which his characteristically questioning, critical poetics have been not so much abandoned as subsumed. His lyricism here finds its inspiration largely in the quotidian, but the same meditative lyric intelligence infuses his homages to a host of poetic muses—to Jose Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, Heinrich Heine, Luis Cernuda, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens, among others. These poems give fierce and stirring testimony to a poet finding a new being in the recreation of a lost world.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

About the author

Heberto Padilla was a Cuban poet, and the center of the so-called "Padilla affair.". He was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces (The Audacious Roses), was published in 1949.

Padilla was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Farrar Straus & Giroux published several editions of his poetry, a novel, En mi jardín pastan los héroes (translated as Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden), and a book of memoirs, La mala memoria (translated as Self-Portrait of the Other).

He was the Elena Amos Distinguished Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Columbus GA, 1999-2000