The Poems of Guadalupe Grande La llave de niebla (2003) Key of Mist Translated from Spanish by Robin Ouzman Hislop & Amparo Arrospide
Excerpt
Streets, courtyards, squares, cages, a microcosm of urban power, the text of the city inhabited by the signs of the artefact and chaos of Babel, the personification of the labyrinth, a moral monster with a fortress-house for a body and a shelter for the desolation of shipwrecked as a head. Here, Guadalupe Grande's Key of Mist (La llave de niebla, translated to English by Amparo Arróspide and Robin Ouzman Hislop) maps the city soul, where linguistic chaos rearranges the poems' voices.
The city, the other civilization, the greatness and the spectrum of its intrinsic ruin, a memento mori for the urban castaway on the waves of asphalt. (...) Such is the ethical landscape in which Guadalupe Grande displays the moral alphabet of her poetic truth, recognizing the city as a hyperspace, where the epic idea of homeland, the country´s ideological circumstances, the historical concept of nation are devastated by the innocent look of someone who does not understand the rush, does not accept the urgency of sacrifice imposed each morning by the necessity of work, the laws of domination, the salary of loneliness.
Juan Carlos Mestre (Trans Robin Ouzman hislop & Amparo Arrospide)
This book represents a thirty-day period of my poetry journal. Each poem addresses
the dominant thoughts occupying my mind during the early morning hours of a given
day.