We have to find a way to not refuse to see where we are, what we are doing, and yet we must still live. And making sure to live - to go through life not around it - was always hard. Making sure to be in the vale of soul - making - as John Keats put it. Now it's insanely hard.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

It's very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one's self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration - that raw lack of feeling whole - that dysmorphia - is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.