Böcker av Ivan Arguelles

Iván Argüelles is clearly one of the most unique and authentic poets working in English today, and I dare say one of the most authentic in any language. His uniquely identifiable voice runs throughout his work, but each of his individual books and poems has its own unique timbre, point of view, its own movement, tone, thematic center. Each work is unique. The nature of his engagement over the past 50 years or so has been far more than a desire to write "poetry", rather, poetry is the air he breathes to embody a complex psychic need, the air he needs to be in the life form and time he occupies. When you consider Iván Argüelles' work, you are not looking at a literary career, but at something basic about the being of living things in general. Proof of this is that the intense late poems in this book (Vol. Two written May 2, 2022 to Nov. 20, 2022) are stronger than ever. His work is one of our greatest treasures. -John M. Bennett

Iván Argüelles is clearly one of the most unique and authentic poets working in English today, and I dare say one of the most authentic in any language. His uniquely identifiable voice runs throughout his work, but each of his individual books and poems has its own unique timbre, point of view, its own movement, tone, thematic center. Each work is unique. The nature of his engagement over the past 50 years or so has been far more than a desire to write "poetry", rather, poetry is the air he breathes to embody a complex psychic need, the air he needs to be in the life form and time he occupies. When you consider Iván Argüelles' work, you are not looking at a literary career, but at something basic about the being of living things in general. Proof of this is that the intense late poems in this book (Vol. One written Oct.21, 2021 to May 1, 2022) are stronger than ever. His work is one of our greatest treasures. -John M. Bennett

Poetry. "FIAT LUX is Ivan Arguelles' Odyssey through all human history and literature, as well as through the kaleidoscope of his own life memories... Portions of FIAT LUX soar as high as any American poetry since Pound's Pisan Cantos."--Fred Bauman "FIAT LUX is most of all about language, the great gibberishes out of which creation and languages come, and the Law of Time..."--Sharon Doubiago "One can read in FIAT LUX an epic poem as it might be dreamed; or perhaps the dream of a culture in which the epic consciousness has been repressed, yet endlessly renews just beneath the skin of thought, in endless metamorphosis, pursuing mortal pleasure... In this world where Chronos is playful, Freud has shacked up in Pythia, one reads our culture's fevered dreams as oracles and symptoms. These prophetic anxieties are a babel of stories, of voices, of worlds, they are the fragments of languages, scattered like shattered beer bottles or amphorae along the highway."--Olchar E. Lindsann

"To be an innovative poet on the Left Coast (or anywhere) is like shouting your truth to an empty (or at best half full) room. This is especially true if your innovations don't match the practice of the current reigning innovation. Iván Argüelles has never been a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, though language-tongue's parlance-is at the heart of what he does. Hearing him read his work aloud is a deep pleasure, but it is also here, on the page, in octogenarian splendor. As Pound, late in life, said of Eliot, after Eliot's death, after decades of output: Read him", Jack Foley. "Two poems per morning from the beloved Iván Argüelles cascade in reverse each overcoming transcendence. This sonic inversion choirs joy, choirs that are speaking-being behind us crablike. This morning: "Is there anything in the sky that looks like the world?" To paraphrase Zbigniew Herbert, the poet with one wing commands the stars to fall and there is light. This is that light coming and going", Solomon Rino.

The authors describe this long poem like this: "Field Hollers was born of insomnia, trading stanzas largely predawn, back and forth before light harrowed." This sequence of stanzas consists of a sort of dialogue, a back-and-forth between 2 "twins" (ie, 2 voices, not 2 sets of twins) who constantly switch places, go into reverse, or speak as one voice, so much so that there is little distinction, really, between them. They become a single double voice, and talk on a metaphoric and metaphysical plane in language that is achingly beautiful and resonant. This is a unique and extraordinary work, and can be read, and reread, in one sitting, and again and again and again.- John M. Bennett

The title means "Diary of an Eighty-Year-Old: A Poem with More Tears than Hands"; the poems or cantos are in English. The Book is a long, intense, lyrical, and often surreal meditation/recollection of a life in all its complexities, with frequent immersions into the loss of friends and family. In short this is a stunningly beautiful, unique, and unsentimentalized invocation of life and its mirror image, death. Argüelles remains at the peak of his powers with this unforgettably intimate, universal, and deeply human work, "where sleep is freed / from waking".