This work demonstrates that twentieth-century Nicaraguan poetry can not be comprehended in its fullest dimension without an understanding of the literary traditions of France and the United States. Ever since Ruben Dario established Hispanic America's literary independence from Spain in the nineteenth century with his modernista revolution, poets in Nicaragua actively have engaged in a dialogue with the works of French and North American authors as a means of assimilating and transforming them and thereby inventing a profoundly Nicaraguan literary identity. This process has resulted in what might be called a double genealogy in Nicaraguan poetry: certain poets attracted to the alchemical properties of the poetic word and a transcendent, mythic, meta-reality seem to have descended from French literary forebears; others, interested in an expansive, poeticized version of history and verisimilitude, have roots that might be traced to North American soil. This division is a provisional, experimental means of grouping Nicaraguan poets based not on the traditional compartmentalization of literary generations, but on the "family resemblances" of poetic affinities. Presented here is an effective analysis of the "familial" nature of the Nicaraguan poets achieving their own literary independence by taking into account socio-political and historical considerations, common literary themes, as well as the intertextual relations that form the basis of international literary dialogues. This rigorous, but flexible, approach to modern Nicaraguan poetry enables the reader to accompany the poets on their journeys toward God and the end of the world; into a timeless Nicaraguan landscape invaded by U.S. Marines; beyond a contemporary urban portrait of Los Angeles; through the horrifying European battlefields of World War I and the trenches of Nicaragua's revolution against the Somoza dictatorship. The English-speaking reader probably will be unfamiliar with most of the seven preeminent Nicarguan poets whose works are the subject of this book, but it is hoped that the reader will realize that the poetry of Nicaraguans Alfonso Cortes, Salomon de la Selva, Jose Coronel Urtecho, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Joaquin Pasos, Carlos Martinez Rivas, and Ernesto Cardenal is worthy of serious study. Furthermore, the poems of these authors take on a richer meaning when they are studied as co-presences in relation to certain texts by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Supervielle, or - in an "American" context - by poets such as Whitman, Pound, Eliot, and Masters. A relatively small country with a rich, diverse tradition in poetry, Nicaragua has maintained high literary standards generation after generation and has produced poets of a world-class stature whose time has come for greater recognition.

Cardenal, Apocalypse and Other Poems. Poems for revolution.

Not a primer in aesthetics and revolution nor in Nicaraguan poetry, but rather a theoretical and sociohistorical intervention on aesthetics, revolution, and Marxism revised from its presentation as the author's doctoral dissertation (U. of Washington, 1990). Assumes some familiarity with the histori

Gioconda Belli's poetry, widely published and revered in Latin America and Europe, celebrates the longing for a society in which humanity constructs its future, animated by an inextinguishable erotic, maternal, and transcentendly loving desire. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his book, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, her poetry is a "kind of public love poetry that comes clower, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard."

The most comprehensive selection of poems in English by Latin America's legendary poet-activist, Ernesto Cardenal.

This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are: Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin Chile--Pablo Neruda China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting El Salvador--Claribel Alegria France--Yves Bonnefoy Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos India--A.K. Ramanujan Israel--Yehuda Amichai Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa Mexico--Octavio Paz Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal Nigeria--Wole Soyinka Norway--Tomas Transtromer Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott