Sara Pujol Russell was born in Barcelona and teaches at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona , Spain , where she specializes in poetry and modern literary theory and works in translation. She is also chief editor of the journal Salina and co-director, with Julia Uceda, of the series La Barca de Loto, which is devoted to studies on poetry and poets. She has published several books of poetry in both Catalan and Spanish since 1980, among them: Omega d’amor (Omega of Love), Mar maduixa ( Strawberry Sea ), and Lentitud d’hivern (The Slowness of Winter). In 1980 she won the Premio Recull for her book, Inquietud de pleniluni (The Unease of a Full Moon). Her poetry has been translated into French, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Chinese, and most notably, Italian by Emilio Coco: Il fuoco del silenzio and Sentire la carenza.

This bilingual anthology, with facing-page format, includes a selection of poetry from her last three books, written in Spanish: El fuego tiende su aire (Fire Floats its Air), Intacto asombro en la luz del silencio (Astonishment Intact in the Light of Silence), and Para decir sí a la carencia, sí a la naranja, al azafrán en el pan (Saying Yes to Lack, Yes to the Orange, to Saffron in Bread). Its goal is to introduce this highly original, extremely modern poetry to an English-speaking audience. Included are an Introduction, a Note on the Translation, and a Selected Bibliography. The Introduction is intended to show how Pujol Russell’s poetry attempts to erase, or at least alter, the fundamental distinction between language and the real, or being.

Pujol Russell’s poetry is extraordinary for the density of presence and for its lyrical complexity. This is highly conceptualized, metaphysical poetry that challenges us to unwrap her imagery word for word and thus to enter intimately into her special universe. Such poetry relies less on narrative and more on the compulsion of words themselves. As she herself remarks, “the anecdote is not important—it only interests me in so far as it is the celebration of the heart in flames, as a festival of reason leaning into its own ardor—if it is vital experience surpassing its own circumstance, if it is spiritual life transcending its own limitations, if it is an interpretation of being and existing in the world.”

The dream of poetry is to be life. In Sara Pujol Russell’s universe, poetry dreams. It dreams like May, it flows in dreams of time, in the scent of the river, in the long silence of grass. In this dream of “clearest certainty,” life and word are one. She writes, “Let me, silence, be like the word—a dance of fire— / and let the word be like me—a dance of water in the grass.” And: “Make yourself silent and breathe / with the harmony of fire your life of air, only air.” This pre-Socratic vision of union is re-elaborated as a kind of dynamic circularity in Sara Pujol Russell’s poetry.

Fittingly, Manuel Mantero calls her poetry “anomalous” in its beauty, strangeness, and ecstatic qualities. Hers is truly an original and new voice coming out of modern Spain . This wonderful poetry will be an exciting revelation to Pujol Russell’s new readers in English.

LC 2005044238

ISBN 1-57591-099-3

Printed in the U.S.A.