Dylan and the Whales
/ included in The New World Written, edited by Paul Hoover
/ POEMS BY MARIA BARANDA
The poetry of María Baranda is a haunting homage to the natural world, transcendent in scope, attentive to the particular, and acutely attuned to the mystery of being. Absorbed by nature’s otherness, Baranda seeks to inhabit the voices of the wind, of wings, night, day, and perhaps most keenly, water. These lyrical verses turn repeatedly to the longings and griefs of embodiment: “What is that God / To be praised with all our sadness / If not love / Or at least the wonder / Of being a body full of blood,” Baranda asks.
Drawing on epics such as the Aeneid and Beowulf, the mystical verses of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and writers who engage the landscape of shore and sea, from Daniel Defoe to Dylan Thomas, this sweeping collection brings together the finest poems of one of today’s most powerful and innovative Mexican writers.
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“A literary event. . . . [Baranda’s] work provides a bestiary as fierce as those found in the Odyssey, Beowulf, or The Waste Land.”
“A valuable collection . . . a metaphysical and philosophical luminosity of language that immerses the reader in cycles of life, death, and a quest for understanding what it means to be able to perceive.”