Isolario / Islarium

Description

This dual Spanish-English collection of poems by a Venezuelan poet focuses on the island nature of his country’s Caribbean coast.

The landmass of Venezuela looks over the Caribbean Sea. From its coast, on clear days, you can see islands, from Aruba to its west, to Trinidad on its east. Adalber Salas Hernández’s collection begins in geography and history – his grandparents came from an island elsewhere – when islands are small, people are often forced to leave them. From these concrete beginnings, this dual language collection, in Spanish and in Robin Myers’ beautiful and musical English translation, moves inwards to the mind and outwards in space, and backwards and forwards in time, to wonder just what islands are.

As Nicholas Laughlin, poet and Literary Director of the Bocas Litfest, writes:
“In the atlas of our dreams, islands hover like mirages on a horizon, equally allegiant to earth, air, and sea. Adalber Salas Hernández’s Islarium — not a single island but an infinity of islands — is similarly, equally, allegiant to both memory and fantasy, to myth and geology, to proliferations of here and elsewhere. Preferring ‘the small, the partial, the fragmentary,’ these texts — essays? poems? — reveal a mind more restless and curious than any ocean current, attentive to the sheer weird lyricism of the human imagination.”