The Catalan Poems

Spain's greatest living poet, Pere Gimferrer (b.1945) has written more than thirty books spanning verse, fiction, essay, and criticism. Though his earliest writings appeared in Spanish, in 1970 he began publishing in Catalan, and has alternated between the two languages since (with occasional forays into French and Italian). The present collection, the first book-length publication of Gimferrer's Catalan poetry in English, brings together work from all phases of his career. His poetry is a marvel of syncretism: Billy Holiday, the medieval polymath Ramon Llull, Ezra Pound, and the artist Tapies all appear in his pages. His style draws equally on modernism, on Galician-Portuguese love lyrics, on Gongora, and on the Valencian metaphysical poet Ausias March. Rounding out the volume will be a selection from the Dietari, an artistic diary published in El Correo Catalan that outlines his poetics and his sense of the artist's vocation through a series of meditations on Ungaretti, Octavio Paz, Alfred Hitchcock and others.