Ricardo Blanco's Blog

Poems for staying at home (Day 33)

  Bunnies and top hats, David Lynch and the dark reverberations of down the rabbit hole; all of this explored by the inimitable Pedro Serrano in this quarantine poem, first published in The Other Tiger.   The Rabbit and… Read More

Poems for staying at home (Day 21)

  Imagine that you are in a dark nightclub and a Tiger is seated at the bar, observing you curiously. Something like this happened to Pedro Serrano in Cardiff a few years back. I know; I was there,… Read More

Far South, foul weather

In the south of Chile, early September means late winter, and the weather is cold and damp. This comes as a shock to the system, if your body still thinks it’s summer. Driving from the airport into Valdivia,… Read More

I kill out of rage

    Since posting María Rivera’s ‘The Dead’ on Wednesday, over 500 people have checked in, and María herself emailed to thank me for posting her poem. ‘The Dead’ evoked some powerful responses from readers. Echoing the views of… Read More

Dark Ages

A new poem by Pedro Serrano, translated from the Spanish by Richard Gwyn. DARK AGES The tiger leaps from a cloud of smoke into transience. Falls on the devastating corral with an idleness corresponding to the haste of… Read More

Fiction Fiesta, reality, and Alastair Reid

The first Borges story I ever read was ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in the translation by Alastair Reid, while living in a derelict shepherd’s hut on a Cretan hillside. A couple of years later, like so many others… Read More

Fiction Fiesta 2015

PREVIEW | FICTION FIESTA 2015 Fiction Fiesta started out three years ago as a conversation in a pub between myself and Nick Davidson, landlord of the now defunct Promised Land in Windsor Place, Cardiff. I was expecting a… Read More

Popocatépetl

Yesterday I came back into Mexico City from Puebla, the massive form of Popocatépetl (5,426 metres) to my left – caught fuzzily on my phone camera – passing the misty woodlands and broad meadows that gather around its… Read More

Feet

  A taster from Mexican poet Pedro Serrano’s collection, Peatlands, translated by Anna Crowe and fresh off the press from Arc, who are to be congratulated, yet again, for bringing another fine writer to the attention of the English… Read More