{"title":"Elena Rivera","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"rest-of-the-voyage-book-elena-rivera-9781555976002","title":"The Rest of the Voyage","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Robert Fagles Prize for contemporary poetry in translation\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Eléna Rivera's translation of Bernard Noël's \u003ci\u003eThe Rest of the Voyage\u003c\/i\u003e is at once original and remarkably faithful--indeed, its originality lies in the care and music the translator has brought to her commitment to follow Noël's forms as closely as possible. Rivera succeeds beautifully in setting the rhythms of the French original into English. The succession of poems has a fluency that becomes as mesmerizing as any mode of transport, for Rivera is remarkably adept at varying the lines, landing with emphasis or muting the effect as she follows the speed and light of Noël's themes. Those themes are no less than a meditation on the traveler's encounter with landscape in the late twentieth century. Noël takes on distant shots and close-ups, moving too quickly to see particulars or so slowly that objects become abstractions, conveying the smells, tastes, and sounds of each location in wholes and parts, reflexively considering what is invisible to a visitor, and meditating on the ancient theme of the voyage of life with great vividness and freshness. Noël is one of the most distinguished living writers in France. Yet Rivera's is the first translation of his poetry into English, and her work thus remedies an unfortunate weakness in English-language letters.\" --Susan Stewart, from the introduction\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49798041534737,"sku":"CIN155597600XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50264005673233,"sku":"CIN155597600XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/155597600X.jpg?v=1751407659"},{"product_id":"epic-series-book-elena-rivera-9781848617322","title":"Epic Series","description":"Epic Series brings together three long poems by Elena Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. Gathered here are Wale; or The Corse, Unknowne Land and The Wait; for Homer's Penelope. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where place is continually shifting, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories- histories of conflict, translocation and injustice.  \"Elena Rivera's Unknowne Land is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape-a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of history quest\/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera's writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched . . . . We are given a contemporary Dantesque work of unique elements held together by spiritual accident and intention-its paradox explored and revealed through the book's architectural underpinnings and entirely unexpected vision.\" -Kathleen Fraser, judge of The Frances Jaffer Book Award  \". . . this is a poem of and about extremity, and it reiterates poetry's ongoing role as an extreme discourse of beginnings and apocalypses, strophes and catastrophes. Language explodes or implodes between the double pressures of tradition and innovation. The eruptions and earthquakes and tremblings in Unknowne Land are only the most literal manifestation of this tension.\" -Elizabeth Willis, The Poetry Project Newsletter   \"Quotation or paraphrase are inadequate to the range of emotional reference in Rivera's book, in part because the emotion accumulates bit by bit-or element by element-as the pain becomes more pronounced (\"To reduce the impact, I curl \/ my body forward\"). By allowing that 'each piece has to be stitched together,' Rivera advocates a careful reading of the work in its entirety; in this way, her emotional argument gains force and momentum.\" -Dawn-Michelle Baude, The Chicago Review  \"'Who bears a record of the world?' Rivera asks as the beginning of the text's first section 'Fire,' and we hear immediately not only the impossibility of a project of such breadth being 'borne,' but also the impossible weight of such a responsibility, given the horror of that record. . . . Hers is a language rich with elegiac illumination, ever testing the edges of the illusory. Rivera questions the possibility for any meaning to adhere, even as she entrances us with the 'rhythm of the pencil' in her attempts.\" -Rusty Morrison, Poetry Flash","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50519933419793,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50519936401681,"sku":"NGR9781848617322","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52691319128337,"sku":"NLS9781848617322","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1848617321.jpg?v=1750834561"},{"product_id":"perforated-map-book-elena-rivera-9781848611603","title":"The Perforated Map","description":"Who guides us through the unknown? Who offers the keys? In The Perforated Map, Elena Rivera's guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills\/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to. The sentence is filled with holes. What is graspable between self and other? Is not all language in transit, moving in gradations of light, between knowing and the fuzzy conveyance shaped by words whose meaning is a matter of further adumbrations? How are we able to communicate our experience? How will understanding be sparked? What message is there for the poet\/the reader? That is what is at stake in these poems, finding the word, the specific word, to illuminate the way, the experience of life, this moment, this time, this period of history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51874751840529,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51874752364817,"sku":"CIN1848611609VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52132278239505,"sku":"NLS9781848611603","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781848611603.jpg?v=1754277642"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-elena-rivera.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}