Antonio Gamoneda

Work that presents itself as a journey: it begins with the description of a territory (Georgicas), then points out the need to leave (The Snow Watcher), stops in fear (Still), seeks shelter in the piety of ove (Pavana impure) and reaches rest (Saturday), the eve of a disappearance that may be death or beginning of serenity.

“When a younger generation of Spanish poets began to awaken and stretch their creative limbs at the dawn of a post-Franco era, what they found, intensified by decades of resistance and years of silence, was the beacon of Antonio Gamoneda’s mature poetry. His evocative sensual palette—the scent, feel, taste, and sound of conflicted experience, a lurching between the repellent and the irresistible—is virtually without comparison. But the real miracle of his work is how he combines that flashy richness with such syntactical concision, and with a folkloric strangeness peculiar to his work alone.” Forrest Gander

“Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold, a long poem in the modernist tradition, is an undisputed masterpiece by Spain’s greatest living poet. In this sensitive and alert translation, Hedeen and Núñez have captured the epic sweep of Gamoneda’s distinctive cadences, halfway between prose and verse.” Jonathan Mayhew

“The poems in Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold can help us sense these intimations of something else, not another form of authority, but something other than ourselves; it can only be seen clearly in the darkness. But that does not mean this light is any less real.” Peter Valente, Heavy Feather Review

“A book-length prose poem musing on life, death, illness, and suicide told over seven sections, in a format that almost dictates how it should be read: a few lines per page to set in place images and feelings, with the remaining negative space on each page a place for reflective, performative meditation of the scene.” Tom Bowden, The Book Beat