“Gastón Baquero's poems are dazzling islands in the sea of contemporary literature: an archipelago of haunting images and music rising from the very depths of the language. . . . The Angel of Rain, expertly translated by Greg Simon and Steven White, is a thing of wonder.”

—Christopher Merrill, author of Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain

Poetry
115 Pages
ISBN: 1-59766-016-7
Paper: $15.95

F.G.L. 

Peace. Now it’s death that has landed
on the steel bands around his chest.
Today the dawn unmakes his bed,
and his dreams play on in the mirror. 

A whole life has been summoned into
a limitless field, space still empty
of his being. He decides to go,
to hear his luminous silence spill. 

He will need to drink the fragrance
of the snow he shelters, of the sands
that could open and swallow a bull. 

Dream of him as our gift to God, bursting
with laughter, verse, passion. Dream of him—
sweet fires on unseen shores start to sing.

Born in Banes, Cuba, in 1918, Gastón Baquero was raised in rural poverty and trained as an agronomist before becoming a journalist. On reading his early work, critic María Zambrano was struck by its “sumptuous sensuality.” The poems were, she said, confirmation of how the “richness of life, the delirium of substance, can stand before the void.” Baquero was active in all the major Cuban literary journals, including Orígenes, but left Cuba immediately after the revolution of 1959 to spend the rest of his life in Spain. He died in 1997, with several collections of essays and journalism to his credit, as well as eight volumes of poetry. Although he was officially nonexistent in Cuba for many years, his work was widely known there. “Distant from all orthodoxy, suspicious of all univocal and exclusionary discourse,” writes editor and fellow exile Pío E. Serrano, “Gastón Baquero has become the most influential poet of new generations of poets in Cuba.”

Praise for The Angel of Rain