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Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems, by Ernesto Cardenal

Edited by Jonathan Cohen; Preface by Lawrence Ferlighetti
Translations by Jonathan Cohen, Mireya Jaimes-Freyre, John Lyons, Thomas Merton, Robert Pring-Mill, Kenneth Rexroth, and Donald D. Walsh

The most comprehensive selection of poems in English by Latin America’s legendary poet-activist, Ernesto Cardenal.

“Ernesto Cardenal is a major epic-historical poet, in the grand lineage of Central American prophet Rubén Darío.” —Allen Ginsberg

Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems charts the life-work of the celebrated poet Ernesto Cardenal—“one of the world’s major poets” (Choice) and “the preeminent poet of Central America today” (Library Journal). Follow Cardenal’s poetic development across six decades, from the early exteriorismo poems and romantic epigrams of the early 1950s, to the increasingly spiritual and political verse he wrote as priest and activist (including his classic revolutionary documentary poem “Zero Hour”) to the shorter victory and ecology poems, and elegies to fallen Sandinistas, and on to the cosmic-mystical-scientific dimensions of his later work. “Here they are—"editor Jonathan Cohen writes in his Introduction, “to gladden your heart and enrich your soul.”

Ernesto Cardenal was born in 1925 in Granada, Nicaragua. Revolutionary activist, disciple of Thomas Merton, Roman Catholic priest, founder of the contemplative commune Our Lady of Solentiname, ambassador for the Sandinistas, Minister of Culture in post-Somoza Nicaragua, and co-founder of the international cultural center House of Three Worlds, Cardenal, on his eightieth birthday, was given the nation’s highest cultural honor, the Order of Ruben Darío, by President Enrique Bolaños in 2005. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Jonathan Cohen has been translating Cardenal's work since 1970. He is the translator of Cardenal’s With Walker in Nicaragua and Other Early Poems (1949–1954) and From Nicaragua, With Love: Poems (1979–1986), which won the Robert Payne Award of the Translation Center at Columbia University. Cohen’s translations of other major Latin American poets have been widely published, as well.