Looking for Poetry

Book excerpt: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the most revered Brazilian poets of the twentieth century, was born in 1902 in a small mining town; he died in Rio de Janeiro in 1987. His poems are, for the most part, bittersweet evocations of a small-town childhood, or, more emblematically, remorseful accounts of a lost world or simply discreet and sometimes ironic views of the way things are. Songs from the Quechua are translated from Spanish version of the folk poetry of the Quechua Indians of South America, collected and transcribed in the nineteenth century by priests and, more recently, by anthropologists. They convey a degree of tenderness that is unusual in any poetry. Rafael Alberti was born in 1902 in Spain and was in exile in Argentina during the Spanish Civil War. He died in 1999. These fifty poems provide an ample introduction to one of the twentieth century's great poets. -- From publisher's description.