Eyes To See Otherwise

"Eyes To See Otherwise" is the first extensive selection of poems by leading Mexican poet Homero Aridjis to appear in English. The range and quality of the translations, by some of America's finest poets, marks the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry.

W. S. Merwin writes, "In his early books, it was immediately clear that Homero Aridjis was a poet of great vitality and originality [his] range grew with astonishing vigour in one book after another... Poems of his have been published in English translation for decades but it is more than time to have a large, widely representative selection of his poems available in English".

Charles Tomlinson recalls, "When I first met Homero Aridjis he was a youthful poet. He has carried that sense of youth with him throughout life and it has left its mark on all his work. Born in a Mexican village, near which the monarch butterflies swarm yearly after their flight from Canada, he experienced early in life a profound relationship with the cycles of nature. This lies at the root of his two principal concerns, poetry and ecology. He not only writes of the whale, but has long fought for the protection of its breeding places in Baja California".

Kenneth Rexroth calls him "a visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces". He adds, "These are words for a new Magic Flute".

Homero Arijis, twice a Guggenheim Fellow, was born in Michoacan, of Mexican-Greek antecedents, in 1940. Poet, novelist, columnist and activist, he is President of International P.E.N. He was Mexican Ambassador to the Netherlands and to Switzerland. His work has been widely translated. Among marks of recognition, in 1997 he received the Prix Roger Caillois in France for his prose and poetry.