Bilingual Poetry Reading by Pura López-Colomé and Her Translator, Forrest Gander, and British-Born Poet Miranda Field, October 25
Reading Continues the 16th Annual Women Poets at Barnard Series

New York, NY, October 7, 2002—The Women Poets at Barnard series continues with a bilingual reading by famed Mexican poet, Pura López-Colomé, and her translator, Forrest Gander on Friday, October 25, at 7 p.m. in Sulzberger Parlor in Barnard Hall (117th Street and Broadway). The award-winning Miranda Field will give her own reading as part of the evening.

López-Colomé established herself as a leading poetic voice in Mexico with her first book, El sueno del cazador, or, The Dream of the Huntsman, published in 1985. Since then she has published several books of equal significance, including, Un cristal en otro, Aurora, and Intemperie. She is also a literary critic and has translated into Spanish major works of H.D., Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Hass, among others.

A concentrated syntax and moral and spiritual engagement distinguish López-Colomé’s poetry, as demonstrated in these lines from Aurora, "Blanca./casi nieve,/y tan húmeda/que no presagias nada,/dede to cadáver fresco/te yergues sola,/resplandeciente,/resucitada inabarcable." Translated into English, they read, "White./Almost snow,/and so humid/that you foresee nothing,/from your fresh corpse/you rose alone,/resplendently,/unembraceably resuscitated."

Although López-Colomé has long been considered one of Mexico’s most important poets and is admired by Seamus Heaney and Robert Hass, the Gander translation of a selection of her works, No Shelter, is the first time her work has been printed in English.

Gander, one of America’s leading poets, is the author of four books and the editor of Mouth to Mouth: 12 Contemporary Mexican Women Poets. His poetry and essays on poetry have appeared in The Nation and The Boston Review, among others. Gander holds degrees in geology and literature and is the Director of the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. He has won a Whiting Award for Writers, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative North American Writing, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Field, whose first book of poetry, Swallow, has already won the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Bakeless Prize, was born and raised in North London, but is now the writer-in-residence at the Teachers and Writers collaborative in New York. She has also won the Discovery/The Nation Award and a Pushcart Prize.

The overarching theme of Swallow is hunger and satiation. As James Longenbranch writes in his Boston Review description of Field’s poetry, "[Her] hunger is a formal principal, and her satisfaction is the continual reinvigoration of the edge – the entrance – on which a reader’s desire depends."

Field never succumbs to the idolization of things she admires, whether beauty, freedom, language, sensory experience, or hunger, as these lines from Hortus Conclusus show:

The body must accompany you
everywhere you go. Now tell it something:
it doesn’t listen. It hasn’t the restraint
to live inside that cultivated space
speech makes. Feed it
from your finger,
a waterdrop with salt dissolved.
This provision is intimate, fiduciary.
Language is intent on entering
its hidden garden.

Contact: Saskia Hamilton, Department of English, 212-854-2721
Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907
James Griffith, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-1139