The Infinite's Ash

Victor Rodriguez Nunez is one of today's most outstanding Cuban writers, although he has lived and worked outside of the island for nearly two decades, first in Nicaragua and Colombia and, since 1995, in the USA. The present collection, based on his selected poems "With a Strange Scent of World: First Anthology, 1978-1998" (Havana, 2004), offers a representative sample, as well as a rewriting, of his early poetic work, full of vivid images from the poet's youth and of both rural and urban Cuba.In an interview, Nunez described his search for 'a poetry that is...participatory yet not political...communicative yet not explicit...dialogic yet not conversational, Cuban yet not essentially nationalist...' and in her introduction to this volume, Katherine Hedeen provides us with background detail that helps to set the poet's work in context. In this first of Nunez's books to appear in English (in Katherine Hedeen's skilful translation), we see poems that are at once committed and experimental, where every limit is challenged, and where emotion and lucidity come together.