John Taylor

Poetry Review: Nobel Prizewinner Vicente Aleixandre—The Poetics of Kissing

May 27, 2013
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This translation of “Poems of Consummation” is important for several reasons, one of which is that the 1977 Nobel prizewinner—despite the award—has long been insufficiently preeminent in our Anglo-American view of twentieth-century Spanish poetry.

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Book Review: “The Bottom of the Jar” — An Indelible Glimpse of Moroccan Life

April 25, 2013
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Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.

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Book Review: Yves Bonnefoy’s Meditation on Poetry — Heady But Essential

April 7, 2013
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Yves Bonnefoy’s book is, fundamentally, a spiritual autobiography; yet it draws extensively on the outside world and ponders how it can be described in writing or depicted in painting.

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Poetry Review: A Provocative Step Out of the Shadows — Poet Anna de Noailles

January 27, 2013
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Literary history credits Rainer Maria Rilke with establishing European poetry’s seminal concern with the duality between inner and outer worlds. Could it be that Comtesse Anna de Noailles was his precursor in this regard? Translator Norman Shapiro and Black Widow Press should be thanked for bringing her back into the discussion.

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Book Review: The Préversities of Jacques Prévert — Enthusiastically Translated

February 20, 2011
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Norman Shapiro’s enthusiasm as a translator is felt not only in the versions themselves but also in his introduction and notes. He relishes finding equivalents for Jacques Prévert’s rhyming, which induces him to take some justifiable liberties in regard to the original. The volume is a true labor of love. Préversities: A Jacques Prévert Sampler…

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