Clean Slate: New & Selected Poems (English and Spanish Edition) - Softcover

Zamora, Daisy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880684098 ISBN 13: 9781880684092

Publisher: Curbstone Books, 1995

Synopsis

To be a woman in revolutionary Nicaragua meant to take an active role in reshaping a country. Daisy Zamora came out of that experience as a poet who found her own voice in the context of extraordinary popular struggle. Her Clean Slate: New & Selected Poems is a collection that embodies a spirit of personal and political liberation. These 110 poems include works written between the years 1968 and 1993.

About this title

About the Author

Daisy Zamora is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Latin American poetry. Her work is known for its uncompromising voice and wide-ranging subject matter, encompassing human rights, politics, revolution, feminist issues, art, history, and culture. She was a combatant in the national Sandinista Liberation Front and served as Vice-Minister of Culture after the 1979 triumph. Her first book of poems won the National Poetry Prize in Nicaragua in 1977. She has published four books in English, including The Violent Foam and Clean Slate. At present she lives in San Francisco with her husband, American poet George Evans. 

Margaret Randall is a poet, translator, editor, activist and scholar, who has been active for six decades. She is known for her collaborations with the Latin American literary left. 

Elinor Randall was a translator, well-known for translating the work of Cuban poet José Martí. She died at age 97. 

Reviews

This first collection of Zamora's work to appear in English is set primarily in the context of the Nicaraguan struggles. Central to this bilingual volume is a probing long poem that juxtaposes a Sandinista Radio report of the day's battles for control of Nicaragua with the speaker's more intimate memories: her grandfather's porch, the church services of her childhood. An active revolutionary, Zamora, in many of her shorter political poems, which comprise a quarter of the volume, unfortunately verges on the didactic. However, through her introspective early work, as well as through previously uncollected recent poems, we see the poet at her lyrical best. Early on, Zamora writes of "this everyday love" and of the woman who feels a "flutter of seeds" in her stomach at her lover's approach. But during the political upheavals she begins to take note of the strength in the women around her. Emerging from torment, her poems assume a wry irony; in one poem she writes in the voice of an "unemployed" housewife, in another she instructs would-be beauty queens. On a more tender note, she makes peace with her mother and seeks to learn about her matrilineal heritage. The translation by a mother-and-daughter team is commendable.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Curbstone Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880684098
• ISBN 13: 9781880684092
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 193