The Art of Keeping Quiet

Poetry that doesn't use words for the sensuality they give off but for the silence they gather. -- Carlos Drummond de Andrade Intense, beautiful poetry, with great intellectual force and great fantastical charm, yet full of imagery that goes straight to the heart. -- Claudio Magris

The Art of Keeping Quiet is the first anthology in English translation by Rodolfo Alonso, one of today’s most renowned Argentine poets.

The Art of Keeping Quiet is the first anthology in English translation by Rodolfo Alonso, one of today’s most renowned Argentine poets. As early as 1956, Raúl Gustavo Aguirre noted in Alonso “a surprising verbal command, where the conquests of modern poetry meld into the terrain of language, while still respecting the structure and spirit of quotidian expression.” Fifty years later, Juan Gelman praised “this crystalline voice that has celebrated existence, giving its expression an essential structure like an expanding spiral. Beauty turns these poems into music; they’re engraved with a formal, imaginative, and conceptual rigor that is exceptional.” Alonso’s poetry is, in short, a radical questioning of solipsism, an exemplary search for the other. A poetry aware of itself, its reaches and limits, always seeking to be reinvented. A poetry that serenely unites aesthetic commitment and the social vanguard.