Today’s poem, by the Bolivian Gabriel Chávez Casazola (pictured above), chimes perfectly with the lockdown zeitgeist. I love the gentle understatement, and calm acceptance of what is. The poem’s speaker dreams of travelling to distant places,… Read More
Today’s poem is by the Guatemalan K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’Abal, who died unexpectedly last year, at the age of 66. I met Humberto only once, but his intelligence, courtesy and gentleness made a lasting impression. Two of… Read More
Today’s house is a childhood home in Santiago de Chile, revisited by the poet Verónica Zondek after years in exile, following the Pinochet dictatorship. The poem burrows and weaves its way through the dusty enclaves of… Read More
Today we have one of my favourite lockdown poems, ‘Plastic Moon’ by the Argentine poet Laura Wittner. As a special bonus we have a guest reader, the American poet and translator Curtis Bauer, who performs from the… Read More
Our house today is ‘The House in Tigre’, by Daniel Samoilovich. Tigre is a small town on the Paraná river, which, on its passage towards the ocean, is broken up by hundreds of small, wooded islands, many… Read More
Today’s poem on the ‘house’ theme comes from Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, whose inventive and gently humorous poetry is among my favourite of any being written today. I think of Rómulo as an exponent of ‘slow’ poetry, his… Read More
Today’s poem for staying at home is ‘Time of Crisis’, by the Mexican poet Fabio Morábito. Morabito’s poetry, infused with a wry and occasionally coruscating humour, is especially suited to the weird times we live in. This… Read More
Today’s house poem, by the Chilean Jorge Teillier, concerns a boy looking out of the window of his parent’s home at a winter landscape. It is the melancholy lyricism of this poem that first attracted me; a mix… Read More
As most of us are staying at home far more than we usually do, I thought I might post a series of poems — or rather, translations of poems — regarding houses. Most of these will… Read More
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