Roger Santivanez

Roberts Pool Twilights Roger Santivanez

Poetry. Cartonera Series. Translated from the Spanish by Elsa Costa. Each copy is a unique, limited edition. The neobaroque poetics of Roger Santiváñez is a poetry of health rooted in the difficulty of composition, like a great shell curved epigraph from Ezra Pound's Canto XVII that begins his trancelike ROBERTS POOL TWILIGHTS, in which we perceive the vital forces of the poetic word unfold in twilight worlds of contemplative ecstasy and compositional struggle. When we read the sensation of the pulsing summer sky swirling in the river at twilight, & the glitter of the river's shimmer, or witness the sheer joy of perceiving the natural world unfurl into a poem writing itself into sheer immanence--'The bushes are perfect they dance... Farewell that's my funeral dirge'--we learn a lesson of what Santiváñez calls mental delight in his ROBERTS POOL TWILIGHTS that hinges on the monumentality yet incandescence to which art aspires. --Adam J. Shellhorse