Book record
The origin of species and other poems
Ernesto Cardenal
Translated from Spanish by John Lyons
Ernesto Cardenal’s The origin of species and other poems, translated by John Lyons, brings together the Nicaraguan poet’s habit of thinking on a cosmic, political, and spiritual scale. Cardenal is rarely merely private. His poems often feel drawn toward the largest available structures: evolution, revolution, prayer, empire, ecology, and time. The title poem’s Darwinian echo suggests a book interested in creation without simplicity. I would read this as a collection where science and theology do not cancel each other out, but argue inside the same lyric field. Lyons’s translation offers English-language readers a route into Cardenal’s expansive imagination, where the poem can become sermon, documentary, love song, and cosmology at once. Its scale is part of its strange generosity.
- Published
- 2011
- Publisher
- Texas Tech University Press
- Language
- Spanish
- Country
- Nicaragua
- ISBN
- 9780896726895