In Order to Talk with the Dead

Download or read book In Order to Talk with the Dead written by Jorge Teillier and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1993-03-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In order to talk with the dead you have to know how to wait: they are fearful like the first steps of a child. But if we are patient one day they will answer us with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror, with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace, with a dark return of birds before the glance of a girl who waits motionless on the threshold." —from "In Order to Talk with the Dead" 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. Carolyne Wright has translated poems from the volumes Muertes y maravillas (1971), Para un pueblo fantasma (1978), and Cartas para reinas de otras primaveras (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."