Translated from Spanish by Roberta Quance
Published May 2025. Paperback, 150pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619203

Can the poet speak for his fellow citizens while recognising the crisis of the self within himself? And the feeling of being disempowered? In modern times, who has ever asked the poet to set himself up as a spokesperson? Piera tackles this problem by demonstrating a prodigious ability to imagine himself as other in order to talk about himself. The poet, characteristically, lives by and through his characters, be they Cassandra (the unauthorised prophetess) mermaids (more threatened than threatening) or the outcast whom he ironically labels ‘weeds’. The worst fate is to have no voice or to have one that is despised, like Cassandra or the ‘weeds’, unable to do much more than scream. Poetry emerges from such contradictions. —From the prologue by Roberta Ann Quance

As Roberta Quance explains, this compilation arose from a long and intimate contact with the poetry of Carlos Piera, from which the desire to translate it into her native language naturally emanated.

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