Flower and Song: Poems from the Aztec Peoples Translated and introduced by Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt.

Poetica 4

`Flower and song' was the ancient Mexican Aztecs' metaphor for poetry. Their brilliant poetic tradition has remained relatively unknown, despite the pioneering work of recent scholars.

Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt are fine poets who have both lived in Mexico; their versions recreate the many facets of that extraordinary society before the Spanish Conquest. They give us powerful echoes of the lyrical and philosophical songs, the songs of rejoicing, sorrow, ritual and war, and the epics of myth and legend. The authors trace the background to this material in their introduction, and the book also contains an appendix of poems from contemporary oral tradition.

Edward Kissam, born in Florida in 1943, spent his formative years in Mexico. He studied at Princeton and at Magdalen College, Oxford, before returning to graduate studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His collections of poems are `The Sham Flyers' (1969) and `Jerusalem and The People' (1972). Since 1970 he has lived in Sonoma County, California, where in recent years he has worked with youth employment programmes for displaced farmworkers and in documentary television production.

Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his publications are six collections of poems, most recently `Choosing a Guest' (1983), his new and selected poems, and a novel, `The Colonist' (1981), about a boy's childhood in Mexico. He is general editor of `PN Review' and managing director of Carcanet Press.