Speaking in Song: Hearing and Forgetting

Amongst the most ambitious and varied work of Pura Lopez Colomes distinguished career Speaking in Song displays the poets extraordinary range and musicality conducting philosophical interrogations of the natural world-and ones story history and place in it-in the context of hearing and memory and in the form of song. Many of the poems have been set to music by composers from Mexico the United States and the United Kingdom. Pura Lopez Colomes poems have an incandescent inwardness of the kind that Marina Tsvetaeva said she found in the poems of Rilke. Whether she is speaking of the guava or the avocado or the sea otter or the movements of the soul or the `unread places of the earth her poems always feel to me like manuals on how to be fully alive. She is in that way a resource and a gift and in this book Dan Bellms English has caught her fire and her music almost exactly. -Robert Hass