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AT THE EDGE OF THE WESTERN WAVE

AT THE EDGE OF THE WESTERN WAVE

$16.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9717265-6-7

Pub Date: Spring 2004

Pages: 120


By Carlos Reyes


What I love about this collection is that it catches perfectly that special sense of rural Ireland which might be described as mixture of raw satirical humour, tragedy, and a kind of yearning for love and connection in a society that feels a constant tension between materialism and spirituality. At the Edge of the Western Wave is a big and sweeping enough collection to be able to accomodate these themes and their nuances: I'm constantly amazed at the way in which Reyes can present a small detail—a shop-front, a "wink" of light, an Hiberno-English phrase, a name, a place name—and evoke a whole way of life.


What's even more important, though, is that there's a clear sense of Reyes as a poet making his way through the shoals of Irish sensibility, first as a stranger with a stranger's alert, even amazed, eye, but later as someone who has become strangely at home in the west of Ireland, but still not losing his alertness for the lyricism of the quotidian. This is a very impressive book.

—Ger Killeen


    Poet and translator Carlos Reyes lives in Portland, Oregon when he is not traveling. He travels a lot, and whether he journeys to Panama, Spain, Alaska or Ireland, those experiences inspire and inform his poetry. In 2007 he was honored with a Heinrich Boll Fellowship, which gave him time to write on Achill Island in Ireland. He has had fellowships to Yaddo and the Fundación Valparaíso (Mojácar, Spain). He was poet-in-resident in 2009 at the Lost Horse Ranger Station in Joshua Tree National Park, and recently writer-in-residence at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska.

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