UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Roberto Márquez

A landmark anthology of Puerto Rican poetry

This volume offers the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of Puerto Rican poetry available in English. It includes the work of sixty-four poets, as well as many previously inaccessible selections from Puerto Rico's tradition of popular verse forms—coplas, décimas, bombas—produced by anonymous writers. All are presented in English, contextualized and individually introduced by Roberto Márquez, a distinguished translator and literary scholar.

Book I, "Before Columbus and After, 1400–1820," focuses on the foundational origins of Puerto Rican poetry and the clash of competing visions embodied in the rich and heterogeneous corpus of anonymous popular verse forms. Book II, "The Creole Matrix: Notions of Nation, 1821–1950s," concentrates on the period in which a distinctively Puerto Rican consciousness emerged and the island's subsequent experience as a U. S. colony in the decades after the Spanish-Cuban-American War up to formal establishment of Commonwealth status. Books III and IV are devoted, respectively, to the era of insular "Critique, Revolt, and Renewal" in the mid-twentieth century, and to the "New Creoles, New Definitions" that developed in the late twentieth century, including the distinct and parallel growth of Puerto Rican poetry in the mainland United States.

In addition to a general introduction and concise biographical profiles of each poet, Márquez provides a detailed "Chronology" of the history of the island that has shaped the poets and informed their work. The resulting volume is a major contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Puerto Rican literature and the heterogeneous society in which it has been produced.

"From the very first pages this anthology takes you by surprise. It is a well-structured and clearly laid-out evolution of Puerto Rican poetry, from three centuries before Spanish colonization right up to the present, and it is full of historical detail and cultural context. The scholarship is astute and insightful, and allows the voices of those who were "there" to speak about the poetry they heard when they first encountered it. This allows for a historical context to emerge with the poetry that gives meaning and substance to a culture that has often been imposed on by other, dominant cultures. . . . This is an outstanding anthology and deserves its place among the best anthologies written on Caribbean and Latin American literature."

KLIATT

"Without a doubt, the most complete and comprehensive anthology of Puerto Rican poetry available in Spanish or English . . . a timely and important addition to the study of Latin American literature in general and Puerto Rican literature in particular."

William Luis, author of Dance between Two Cultures:
Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States

"I cannot emphasize enough what an important book this is, and how admirable and noble Roberto Márquez has been to dedicate himself with such perseverance and intelligence to this imposing task. He has built a forceful cultural bridge just where and when one is needed, and gratitude will surely be due him for generations to come."

Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip Hop:
Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity

Roberto Márquez is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Mount Holyoke College.

Poetry / Puerto Rican Studies
528 pp.
$28.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-562-3
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 978-155849-561-6
January 2007

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