Harbors of Light by Marjorie Agosín and translated by E. M. O’Connor

This is poetry from Chile.

Harbors of Light by Marjorie Agosín translated by E. M. O’Connor is published by White Pine Press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.78193521087E12.

Marjorie Agosín’s Harbors of Light, translated by E. M. O’Connor, brings together exile, Jewish memory, Chilean history, and lyric tenderness. Agosín’s poetry often works through witness and recovery, especially around displacement, dictatorship, women’s lives, and the fragile materials of memory. The harbor is a powerful image for her: a place of arrival and departure, refuge and loss, light seen from water. O’Connor’s translation keeps the poems accessible and emotionally clear, which suits work that wants to be both intimate and communal. I would recommend this book to readers who want poetry that honors grief without making grief the only atmosphere. Harbors of Light suggests that witness can also be a sheltering act. The poems stand at the edge of history and hold up a lamp, not to erase darkness, but to help the living find one another.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.