Birnam Wood: El Bosque de Birnam

A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2018. Awarded Best Translation in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Winner of the NYC Big Book Award, Independent Press Award, Best Book Award in Poetry, Readers' Favorite Award Gold Medal in Poetry, Julie Suk Honor, and Pinnacle Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Book. One of the most impressive collections of poetry I’ve read in recent years. It is a work that can sit easily beside Seferis’s great poems of exile and return, or beside Elytis’s gigantic sequence of the Albanian campaign. This is Europe yearning: ‘Exalted were you in my dreams,/ Almost inaccessible like an island/ Sought and sought for years.’ —Thomas McCarthy, Poetry International “It’s possible things are not/ as we wished them to be,” José Manuel Cardona writes in Birnam Wood, a superb account of his travels around the world in the service of poetry. Exploring the consequences of the fact that “Only man is capable of destroying/ what he never created/ and he along believes belong to him,” he creates a rival system of belief, which depends upon his vivid imagery, sophisticated ear, and wisdom borne of experience, all of which his daughter, Hélène, a gifted poet in her own right, has gracefully preserved in her translations. This selection of his poems, spanning the length of an illustrious career, are everything we might wish them to be. –Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood Birnam Wood embodies the self in the world of myth with its attendant themes of tragedy and fate. If the water of exile is longing, the cup brims over in these sun-shattered works of diaspora. Cardona is an essential twentieth-century Spanish poet. His poems journey toward an ever-receding home. –Marsha de la O, author of Antidote for Night