The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out: Selected Poems by Ana Enriqueta Tern

(Paperback)

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Ana Enriqueta Teran is arguably Venezuela's finest poet. Celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, she is almost unknown among anglophones. Until now only a handful of her poems have been translated into English, giving at best a diluted impression of a uniquely intense imagination. This bilingual edition reveals the power and beauty of this poet's Spanish poems through English versions of corresponding force. It invites readers to enter Teran's world - a world at once strongly Venezuelan and universally human, imbued with great beauty, sardonic humour, pitiless compassion, lucid wisdom, and joyful affirmation. Selected from several volumes of Teran's work, these poems span half a century of composition and show a range in both form and substance. Some are written in closed forms, some in free verse. Some are carefully evocative representations of the landscapes and cityscapes that have nourished the poet's intelligence and imagination. Others are dramatic character studies. All are infused with Teran's rare sensibility and realized through language that manages to be at once graceful, urgent, and explosive.

Reviews

"Startlingly vivid and technically masterful poems, whose range and complexity [have] few equals... [A] fiercely intimate journey contained in a slim but thoughtful volume."--Christine Thomas, American Book Review "The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out ... is a demanding selection of poems interweaving fables, myths, dreams, bold similes, and heightened visions of reality in order to interpret and commemorate what often nonetheless seem to be personal experiences. It is a sometimes puzzling yet also singularly sensual and resonant mixture, especially in the many cases where poems exhibit a semantically rich, philosophically ambitious, extremely compact lyricism."--John Taylor, Antioch Review

Author Bio

Ana Enriqueta Teran is one of Venezuela's best-known poets and has published more than a dozen books of poetry. She was named Doctora Honoris Causa by the University of Carabobo and, in 1989, was awarded her country's highest literary honor, the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Now in her eighties, she is writing her autobiography to be published only after her death. Marcel Smith is Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Alabama. He has published translations of Spanish poems in a number of journals. This is his first book.