|
|
|
|
AZTEC
AUTOPSIES &
MARIACHI MURALS: POEMS
|
David
Gershator visits and re-visits
Mexico in poems Peggy L. Fox
described as “a surreal blend of the
spiritual and the visceral.”
Ranging from lyrical love poems to
headline grabbing news clips, from cris
de coeur to hallucinatory
visions, the poet explores myth and
madness, politics and pain. As
translator/editor of Federico García
Federico’s Selected Letters,
and student of the poet’s brother,
he takes his cues from Lorca’s
experiments in Poeta en Nueva
York and from Inga
Clendinnen’s description of Mexica
“aesthetics,” in her book Aztecs:
An Interpretation, as
operating “through a kind of
surrealism achieved by dislocation.”
Writer/musician/critic Matthew
Paris, reviewing the text, called
Aztec Autopsies “Whitmanesque
in its departure from formal
tradition of the Old World, its
search for epiphany in the physical
and real, its appreciation of the
world that comes to one carnally,
its delight in the disciplines of
perception, it is the verse of a
poet ... who sees all things and
people as exotic, a gnostic at the
heart of his skepticism who praises
the miracle of a world at once
tragic and ultimately unknowable.”
From Home Planet News late
co-founder and poet Enid Dame: “The
Mexican poems are brilliant!”
The 100 page collection includes a
glossary and 17 pen and ink drawings
by the poet.
Available
in paperback. ISBN 978-1-6319215-4-4. Solar
Noon Books, 2014.
Also available as an e-book.
|
|
From Aztec Autopsies--
an interview
with the Aztec
sun god, Tonatiuh:
INTERROGATING TONATIUH
Where do you shine?
In the eyes of daydream
daughters
beating cornmeal to death
beneath pyramids of salt
What do you eat?
The hybrid seeds in the
furrow
leading straight to the
first serpent
the first heart
Where do you sleep?
In a bed split by stones
cracking the brains of
sorcerers
haunted by a panic of
epileptic parrots
What do you see?
The seeds of skeletons
The skins of cocoons
The petrified fury of
blood
What questions remain
unanswered?
How do you answer the
night?
How deep is the voice of
the grass?
Why do you polish the
hummingbird?
|
Three
more poems from
Aztec Autopsies.
|
|
|
|
|