Salvo el crepúsculo

Salvo el crepúsculo / Save the Twilight: Selected Poems

Poetry , 1984

Alfaguara

Pages: 358

"Cortázar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortázar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable."––Publishers Weekly, starred review

World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortázar was also a prolific poet. While living in Paris during the last months of his life, Cortázar assembled his life's work in verse for publication, and Save Twilight selects the best of that volume.This expanded edition, with nearly one hundred new pages of poems, prose and illustrations, is a book to be savored by both the familiar reader and the newcomer to Cortázar work. Ranging from the intimate to the political, tenderness to anger, heartbreak to awe, in styles both traditionally formal and free, Cortázar the poet and subverter of genres is revealed as a versatile and passionate virtuoso. More than a collection of poems, this book is a playful and revealing self-portrait of a writer in love with language in all its forms.

"Some people run the world, others are the world. Cortázar's poems are the world; they have a special consideration for the unknown."––Enrique Vila-Matas

"What a pleasure, this walk in a well-orchestrated park with shades as complex, as light & as dark, as multifoliate as the actual world! This book—the 'poetic ecology' Cortázar had envisioned—is an open invitation to make yourselves at home twixt sea and loss, wine & sorrow, birth & riptide, tobacco & talk, laughter & death. Nothing human is foreign to the poet—& he brings it home with great clarity & grace. The writing & the book embody a tradition of hospitality, or as Cortázar puts it: 'Hello little black book for the late hours, cats on the prowl under a paper moon.' The injunction to save twilight stands as title—it is also exactly what the writing accomplishes."––Pierre Joris, author of Barzakh (Poems 2000-2012)