In Order to Talk with the Dead

<p>In order to talk with the dead<br> you have to know how to wait:<br> they are fearful<br> like the first steps of a child.<br> But if we are patient<br> one day they will answer us<br> with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror<br> with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace<br> with a dark return of birds<br> before the glance of a girl<br> who waits motionless on the threshold.</p> <p>-from In Order to Talk with the Dead</p> <p>Reared in the rainy forests of Chile's La Frontera region which had nurtured Pablo Neruda a generation earlier Jorge Teillier has become one of Chile's leading contemporary poets whose work is widely read in Latin America and Europe along with the poetry of his well-known contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. This English-Spanish bilingual anthology now introduces English-speaking readers to Teillier with a representative selection of his best work from all phases of his career.</p> <p>Carolyne Wright has translated poems from the volumes <i>Muertes y maravillas</i> (1971) <i>Para un pueblo fantasma</i> (1978) and <i>Cartas para reinas de otras primaveras</i> (1985). Avoiding the bravura effects of some of his contemporaries Teillier writes from a life lived directly and simply returning time and again in his poetry to the timeless and mythic South of his boyhood the Land of Nevermore.</p>