The Turning

by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Overview

Pau-Llosa’s poetry makes intellectual demands from his reader, not so much aiming at abstractions as to make the concrete forms of poetic language intelligible. He honors his reader by not making concessions, all the while casting spells with an inventive prosody. In this, Pau-Llosa’s best work yet, one finds an evident joy in the craft of verse, masterful language put at the service of sustained reflections on the world’s, and life’s, wonders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887486395
Publisher:	Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Series:	Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1954. In 1960 his family fled the communist takeover and arrived in Chicago. In 1968, by way of Tampa, they moved to Miami. His books include Sorting Metaphors, selected by William Stafford for the Anhinga Prize, Bread of the Imagined, and Cuba, the latter also published by the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series. Additionally, he is a noted international authority on Latin American art.

Table of Contents

I

Wedding, Port-au-Prince 15

Eva Tropical 16

Nkonda: Clearing a Path 17

Barbas 18

Thetis 19

Rembrandt's Andromeda 20

Dove Lake 21

En Plein Air 22

Soldiers Washing (1927) 23

Reflections at MMA Masters, Miami 24

Infanta 25

Moon over Barcelona 26

GDR China 27

Tierra Adentro (Inland) 28

Ghost Orchid 29

Storm 30

The Red Case 31

Allegory of Art 33

Bruges 34

Phalaenopsis 35

Plural 36

Ariadne, Crete 37

El Expolio 38

Isabeau 39

Castillon 40

Guillaume de Machaut: Arguments 41

Narcissus 42

Lagos de Covadonga 43

The Turning 44

Variation and Extension of "Flower Shadows" by Su Shi (1037-1101) 45

The Elevator 46

Papyrus Fragments 47

Squandered Moons 48

Rings 49

View of Toledo 50

Delta 51

Husserlian Meditation 52

Reef 53

Farm 54

Artemis: View of Actaeon 55

II

A Byzantine Carving of Orpheus 59

Illuminations 60

Assyria at the British Museum 62

The Menin Road (1918) 64

Anno Domini 452 65

Kensington 66

Bath 68

Visteme despacio que voy de prisa 70

Job 28;9-13 71

Clearing the Florida Coast 72

Summer, Florida Keys 73

Luxury 74

Popoloso deserto 76

Port of Miami, from the MacArthur Causeway 78

Flying above Missouri 79

After Han Gan, Groom with Two Horses 81

Indexical Reflection 83

Cerbatana, Yanomami 84

Ogygia 85

Idea of Order at the Metropolitan Museum 87

Fan 90

Actaeon, Closing Arguments 92

At the Chest of Drawers (1936) 93

Lupanar 94

Cartoneros, Buenos Aires 95

Beggar 97

Solvitur Ambulando 99

Regina 100

Cuba, Where Art Thou? 101

Monsters 102

Siege 104

The Sons-in-Law, Sodom 105

Daytime Moon 106

Democracy 108

Variation on Quevedo's Variation on Seneca, Ovid 109

Artemisa Japanese Car Care, Miami 110

The Prodigal's Brother 112

Little Ones 115

Lamb 117

What People are Saying About This

Enrico Mario Santi

“The Turning is a dazzling display of lush verse, lucid parables and aesthetic dignity. Working at the crossroads of Baroque language (Donne, Quevedo) and Modernist imagination (Stevens, Borges), Pau-Llosa is equally at ease in ekphrastic awe as in philosophical reflection. Memory, dream and time in poems of such immediacy, are reborn in a new language.”

Cathryn Hankla

“Pau-Llosa has lost not one country but two, and the only reasonable thing to do when so unmoored is to vigorously adopt the country of art. Poetic heir to Stevens and Rilke, in The Turning, Pau-Llosa turns toward observation, seeing itself, for salvation and invites us to savor his insights and wondrously wrought words.”