Selected Poems. OCTAVIO PAZ

Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists ´who drew their own maps of the world.´ For Latin America´s foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War. to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s. to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years. to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country´s ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968. and to various universities in the United States throughout the 1970s. A great synthesizer, the rich diversity of Paz´s thought is shown here in all its astonishing complexity. Among the sixty-seven selections in this volume, a gathering in English of his most essential poems drawn from nearly fifty years´ work, are Muriel Rukeyser´s now classic version of ´Sun Stone´ and new translations.