Translated from Spanish by Dan Bellm
Published 2017. Paperback, 154pp, 9x 6ins.
ISBN 9781848615540 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Among the most ambitious and varied work of Pura López Colomé’s distinguished career, Speaking in Song displays the poet’s extraordinary range and musicality, conducting philosophical interrogations of the natural world—and one’s 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.

In ‘At the Wellhead,’ a sonnet that Pura López Colomé has translated, Seamus Heaney brings us to the edge of a deep well, a place of blindness and solitude that is at once a path, a support, and a musical instrument. Something similar happens with Speaking in Song, in which song can be heard as if from its original source, and from a joy just as deep, dazzling as white tissue over the whitest of silk. Pura’s songs reach our hearing like the earth itself speaking, but without swallowing us up—and likewise, though forgetting may pour down like rain, it can never erase our soundless reading. —Francisco Hernández

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