The Azure Cloister – Thirty–Five Poems

"Belli’s work seeks the limits of human experience in forms that summon 'the bodies in which we dwell,' sometimes with what Maurer calls the 'tortuous Gongoresque syntax' of the Spanish Baroque, and in evocations of the timeless, abject, and ineffable." * Harriet (Poetry Foundation) *
“Belli has proven time and again that poetry can be both a renewal and enrichment of the language and a protest against inequalities.” * Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas *
"I began reading Belli when he published his first poems, back in the fifties, in a magazine called Mercurio Peruano, and I needed only to read those half dozen texts to feel that this was a new voice, of powerful lyrical worth and great imaginative audacity, capable—as only great poets are —of transforming ugliness into beauty, sadness into stimulation, and turning to gold—that is to poetry— whatever he touches. All that Belli has written since then has only confirmed and enriched his extraordinary gift of poetry." -- Mario Vargas Llosa, Winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature
"Carlos Germán Belli is an indispensable poet, and his poetry--intimate, pure, inimitable--is waiting for us in the future. Reader, you are that future." -- Raúl Zurita, Chilean National Prize for Literature and Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry
"Belli attends to the emotional hues and ironies of contemporary life with the refined textures of the Spanish Baroque. His poems create dreams and landscapes of past and present where language and experience bear the traces of technological change. In this remarkable translation, as in Belli's originals, a range of linguistic registers,  times and places are woven into a seamless tapestry, and every rhythm and accent matters. Maurer has managed to invent an English idiom that captures the subtleties of a poet who—along with César Vallejo and Blanca Varela—is one of Peru's very greatest." -- Efraín Kristal, distinguished professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Comparative Literature, UCLA