The World Poetry Anthology, celebrates the 25th anniversary of Shabdaguccha, an international bilingual poetry magazine edited by Hassanal Abdullah. All poems published here previously appeared in Shabdaguccha from 1998 to 2023.

This volume presents poets like Pablo Neruda, Jibanananda Das, Stanley Kunitz, Adonis, Louise Glück, Jayanta Mahapatra, Bengt O Björklund, Kazimierz Burnat, Manfred Chobot, John Kinsella, Dariusz Tomasz Lebioda, Amir Or, Shamsur Rahman, Serge Pey, Nat Scammacca, and many more from fifty-nine countries.

Hassanal Abdullah’s vision of world poetry . . . strives not just for an inclusive global reach but for a sense of poetry as a habit of life, a habit which can disclose both entail complexity and depth of feeling. Abdullah has provided a poetic matrix in which readers can always be surprised, and in which the most gratifying satisfaction will always necessarily yield to something new and something more surprising.

—Prof. Nicholas Birns, Department of English, New York University

This anthology provides contributing poets the opportunity to see each other as members of a literary community. We are all, quite literally, “in this together.” Perhaps it will inspire authors to communicate with each other and with the broader audience more freely. I hope everyone will read the anthology with a sense of urgency, particularly reflecting on how poets have contributed their ideas and passions to the shaping of a complex and tense new age in which a global perspective is our only home for survival.

—Prof. Joan Digby, Professor Emeritus, English Department, Long Island University.

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The poet Jade Castellanos writes a gift of enigma in ninety-six compositions, in one of the shortest poetic genres that Japan contributed to universal literature: it is the haiku, written in Mexico, in which the author dusts off and recreates the best of tradition, to give us a bundle of songs that weave the thin voice of silence, the invisible body of the enigma and the luminous cry of loneliness.

What Jade Castellanos has built in this book is a memorial of the sigh: a succession of moments that liquefy in the word the traces of memory and the juices of life. What is Before the Water is the newborn creation in the amazement and silence of the primordial word.

We are the sum of our silences when the reason for our writing pays tribute to love. The author’s pen melts in these verses: “From fire I come / chimera’s red flower / unto the dawn”; and likewise in these others: “Feverishly / like an ecstatic mare / I’m going to you.”

On the other side of the heart, the same seventeen syllables in three verses are also an instrument of social criticism. The author says: “Where the children / ask for treat or trick / they get shot”; then, with a writing of superior craftsmanship, she refines the telescopic sight of the poem, and finishes: “A sun deader / than all of the dead / prays for them.”

The moment of the haiku, in all of the corners and surroundings that we have investigated in Before the Water, is not of this earth or this world: it is calligraphy that nails its roots in a beyond of us that belongs to the architecture of another time and perhaps to the allegory of the celestial spheres.   —Leopoldo González

Before the Water is the 29th title of Darklight’s bilingual poetry series. It has an introduction by Leopoldo González and a beautiful cover and interior illustrations by the Mexican graphic artist Alonso Venegas.

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The deep nature of the word is the invisible blood of freedom: without it, we would be a society condemned ad perpetuam to cloning the genetics of the monkey beyond the square meter we walk on. For this reason, Notebook to Get Through the Night is a poetic plea in defense of man and his freedom, while at the same time being a call to prevent the imposition of Thanatos as emperor of earthly darkness.

—Fco. Javier Larios Medina

EXILE

If exile is the homeland,

I warmly welcome myself

to the saltpeter and humor of this land,

to the abandonment written in the gall

and the shreds of letters,

to the cornered beast heart

that throbs in my bones,

to the siege around my skin set by

the raging teeth of the wind.

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The comfortless poetic voices created by Dana Gelinas in this book of epigrams burst before the eye and ear of the reader, invoking the Latin poet Marco Aurelio Marcial, the author of the two most famous and compelling epigrammatic books of Latin poetry: Xenia (Gifts for the friends) and Apoforeta (Gifts for the guests) and she closes it with the poem “Incitato”—Caligula’s horse name—whom the emperor wanted to name as a priest and consul (according to Suetonius). If tyrants have populated and will continue to populate our human experience with terror and death, the sharp and bare verses of Dana Gelinas paint in red hot the disgust that must inspire in us the limitless incompetence and arrogance of the power of untruth and the untruth of the power.

—Rei Berroa

IX

If you look at his wardrobe,

Donald has a nice hood,

a romper that his mommy made for him,

a very cute hooded romper.

Milky Way white;

white as the whitest of gods.

Postscript: Under Trump

tanning was made tax free.

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Like Gaea to the planet and Demeter to the forsaken and forlorn, Diane Block hears the cries of society’s so-called losers, enters the jails, heals and lightens the lives that inhabit them and her creations. Diane is more than an accomplished musician, she is a virtuoso whose violin mastery causes the listener to levitate, to then seek the clouds in her poetry. —Art Gatti

When Ice Melts to Green / Del deshielo al verdor, bilingual edition, translated into Spanish by Roberto Mendoza Ayala and Arthur Gatti, displays amazing digital images created by the Mexican artist Alonso Venegas, and it is the twenty-sixth title of the "Bridges" bilingual poetry series, published by Darklight in New York City.

PSALM: TO A VIOLIN

arm of my arm body of my body you wear your cracked skin cradle crook of elbow

fold into me your scroll my lid your peg my bone your bridge my tongue you burn vowels green vein wound the skin

treble strings my gut sing sotto voce wound to taut pitch blood quaver pulsate inner lobe

when all is spent a frame of blue

who will have you when I am gone? arm of my arm blood of my blood body of my body

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In Blanca Luz Pulido's Moonstruck, birds play a leading role. The flight, the infinite spaces, the trees, the horizon and the light, form a constellation of motifs that have their core in birds. She says in a poem: "I love the simplest acts"; and in another one, more forcefully: "It's the small things / that decide the drift of worlds." The small and the simple do not exclude birds and their excessive freedom, rather they bring that excessive freedom within our reach. —Fabio Morábito

TREASURE

I saw him one day: by a crowded avenue, among the rushing people, hovering in the shrubbery of the sidewalk, a sparrow carrying in his flight a very large bough.

It was a flash: just seconds when we both went on parallel; he, with the bough that hindered his flight, and me looking at him.

Beside him, by an instant, I was the bough held in his beak, approaching the nearby nest where they awaited the treasure.

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Terry Edmonds’ poetry confronts us in subtle and powerful ways. Drawing from his own improbable journey from the projects of Baltimore to notable professional successes, he achieves a philosophical approach to some of the most salient issues of our time. Love, poverty, family and injustice are addressed in a collection of reflections and questions that encompass both the intimate and the universal.

TURBULENCE

Cruising fifteen hundred feet subzero mid-flight above the Arctic, ancient peaks of stone-edged passion peek through clouds half dressed in flimsy blankets of windblown snow

The only sound a slightly off-beat crackle of watercolor blue ice melting – echoes of warming extinction

A huddle of shivering penguins sit shiva for the planet tonight

From every man-made bird’s eye view the rising sea murmurs: Peace be still no more

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The Eyes of the Tree, an ancient oak that is Roberto López Moreno himself, endures the vertical sun as well as the nocturnal frost, and narrates and sings what the multiple layers of its bark keep: confessions and anguish, hopes and despair, temptations and passions, mourning and parties, loneliness and communion; where Octavio Paz, the other voice, has a special place in the mind and heart of the tree-poet.

V

Whirl that falls down from the Balbuena lighthouse, but you don’t want your body, from the fateful seventh floor, but you don’t want your body, from the phallic seventh round, but you don’t want your body, you, interior circuit, but you don’t want your body, I, the ragged of this night, but you don’t want your body, neurosis at eleven the guy who writes verses, the perfect asshole, but you don’t want your body, a song if you want to, but you don’t want… Why don’t you want your body anymore?

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In the poems of Sand Drawings, we are before a soul that vibrates to the rhythm of the universe, and gives us finely crafted verses that show an important mastery of the word […] the life-death opposition; the constant contradiction that defines us, or rather, that leaves us to languish forever undefined. Víctor Hugo Hidalgo Ruiz expresses his disappointment at a world in perpetual catastrophe; a world in which there is no paradise; only the wait for it.

BIG BANG

(Fragment)

There is an eternal dispute

—the need to be right

is older than any universe—

resentful believers

unshakeable atheists

everyone disputes the truth

like the last atom of carrion

God blew up a former world

Didn’t they know it?

[…]

Don’t they know his pyromaniac inclinations?

Isn’t He all light?

Sometimes a comet passes by and we make a wish

it is a butt that God

throws when he reflects about his failures

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Poetry arrives in many guises, but rarely does it present itself as vividly as in this powerful collection of insights, images and soul songs. The world of poetry is a better place, thanks to The Shape of an Ark. We are buoyed as though accompanying a spiritual Noah, assured in the hopes of the covenant, so finely expressed by this poet, as she cries out, as a harbinger, against the horrors of history’s endless repetitions, never letting us forget the old and deadly lessons. —Arthur Gatti.

SPECIAL MILITARY OPERATION

Even in the desecration resistance is a girl playing violin in a bunker for the dispossessed

bundled against cold a woman offers an invader a handful of sunflower seeds

someone’s mother someone’s son

she points to a frozen field pocked with craters

last spring it blazed with gold waving to our children put these seeds in your pocket when we take back our homes and you are food for scavengers the curse of war will bless us with sunflowers you freed to feed our souls again.

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This poetry book is like a black cat that dances around on the rooftop, it summons colors from some movie stars, licks little sensations left on the pavement of some Downtown streets and goes back home to cuddle on your soul. —Lucía Izquierdo

THE STUNTMAN

As I drink coffee and go through the morning papers
the other ties my tie
and he goes out to fulfill my routine.

To be clear:
I’m not exposing my subconscious
nor do I use rhetoric
or metaphysical tricks:

Like in the movies
I pay a stuntman
to grow old behind the windows
so that they assault him in the subway tunnels
so that he smiles when being despised
and answers submissively
when the giants call out my name.

At night he is accountable to me.
He always looks overwhelmed
and never seems satisfied with his pay.

His eyes
haunt me with anger
and then a deep fear invades me
that things will change
that suddenly a hand
will reverse the roles.

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This book is the woman soul of the poet— the ageless suffering of endings. Her imagery astounds us at times, for her vision is unique in its chiaroscuro take on existence. Her erotic hope chest is a hastily packed suitcase at times, and when it’s vivid and clear, that sensuality draws out the same in the reader, who is immersed in the tender keepsakes and inevitable shards of loves gone by. --Arthur Gatti

TAKE DOWN THE SKY

Take down the sky.
I need it.

Wrap me in its
Cobalt purity.

Be a cloud, white and
Gorgeous, but nothing.

Blue-blooded, blue-veined,
Blue-skied tossing lightning.

Make me the sky,
Far from sidewalk sorrow.

Swallow the sun, and
Be incandescent.

Give me gravity.
Birth me a new orbit.

Name me
The Phoenix planet.

Kristin Robie, born into a military family beset by alcoholism and depression, studied poetry at Brandeis University with poet laureate Howard Nemerov. She retires form Internal Medicine (MD, FACP) in 2016. Reading poetry in workshops / cafes in NYC, she has edited several anthologies. Inspiration, she says, comes from trying to answer the question of how to live an honest life.

The Purest Tears Are Light / El llanto iluminado is the nineteenth title in the "Bridges" series of bilingual poetry books edited in New York City by Darklight Publishing and was translated into Spanish and edited by Roberto Mendoza Ayala and Arthur Gatti; it contains beautiful illustrations by the graphic artist Lora Wanta.

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Unknown Words by Roberto Mendoza Ayala is a markedly literary collection; not that it is at all precious or pretentious, but rather that its author is very conscious of the fact that this is literature, an artful construction of language, not merely spontaneous outpourings, angry diatribes or personal laments.

One of the author’s great themes of wonder involves the magical chemistry of words interacting and combining like the elements, together with its complement, the power of the human mind.

These poems boldly embrace complex ideas and feelings and represent serious and penetrating thought leavened with playfulness and irony, and illuminated by metaphors that often startle. —Robert Kramer

DEAD FLY

Behind these bars there’s a poem
waiting for his day off,
for a mind that will take him for a ride
among new ideas
and put him back
safe into his jail
—As if he wouldn’t even hurt a fly! —
while the curly locks of the air
catch fire outside.

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In Exodus to Genesis, Félix Cardoso approaches erotic themes, those that he best dominates, openly, without softening anything, without sweetening any element. The pleasure of sex and the enjoyment of the body are proclaimed in this book as the fullness that saves the everyday from the crossroads that always end in death. Erotic poetry, by its very carnal nature, is like an affirmative cry of life. —Daniel Baruc Espinal

In Felix Cardoso’s ecstatic poetry, sex is the portal to a dream that allows him to wake up naked in any garden. At the same time Cardoso the lover takes care of every waking detail in order to keep the dream going. It’s the spell of sex that keeps him alive. Exodus to Genesis is two things: a rhapsody on the magic of the senses and, in a loving tribute to a dead grandfather, a lament for the ultimate victory of time. —Stephen Bluestone

GENEROUS RAIN

Spring swells break, leaving barefooted sails on my pillow, pursuing sighs gathered in the window, turning your face away seconds before you hug me.

For an instant, I felt I managed to graze in your sweats, crawl between moans about to explode.

You so calm, I so restless...

Rain falls generously.

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Navarro’s work in Syllables on Hold stands out in the best of contemporary poetry for its associations of images and verbal spins of great will; however, it has obvious winks towards the Mexican writers most loved by the author while essays multiple interpolations with world literature.

Syllables on Hold is a large sample of the writing of Víctor M. Navarro that has accumulated in recent years. Poems that pay homage not only to his neighborhood but to the whole, to a city populated by essential writers: a city that is loving and perverse at the same time.

ALWAYS DAYS

I renew the buildings of my existence /
the gaze beyond the gaze /
the folders and the leafless notebook /
little is left of my reluctance /
that rented flat and its mould /
the room furnished with memories /
the twelve-year-old girl of whipping kisses /
the neighborhood’s wretched cabaret and waiters /
the infinite drunkenness of the poem /
this gray hair that is not because of holding back desire /
incipient serpentine death /
and the days always the days.

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Robert Kramer is a poet of perception and reflection; he observes, he thinks and feels. He makes us notice the margin of our lives, redeems the drabness of the daily, makes the trivial significant, the forgettable unforgettable.

Enhancing Kramer’s nuanced moods and descriptions is a remarkable precision of imagery. The new boy in the neighborhood

slouches and scuffs the black-tarred street / with his ragged canvas sneakers.

Especially memorable are the lines at the end of a poem. A sudden childhood memory

…startles, like the echo of a cough / in an empty cathedral.

His father remembers the frozen pond

where girls and boys in brightest sweaters / would skate and sport on the ragged ice, / avoiding the driftwood that protruded from the surface, / like the clawing hands of drowned hoboes.

And in a woman’s fantasy

A leering sailor in a red-striped under-blouse, / tight white bell-bottomed trousers / wanders through her Parisian dreams and nightmares, / a red pompom bobbing on his jaunty slanted cap.

Following these impressions are vignettes of writers and artists of the past, evoked with Kramer’s subtle and meaningful precision.

And to round things out, he offers a series of short poems patterned on Chinese poets of another age, treasured moments of joy and fantasy and grief. Kramer’s world is simultaneously tiny and vast. He invites us to partake of it. If we do, we will be the richer for it. —Clifford Browder

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Evie Ivy’s work contains the flavor of the dance, particularly the graceful Oriental dance (a/k/a belly dancing), of which she is an instructor, being a practitioner from her youth.

The mysteries of the night and the secrets of the sacred writings, the rites, the trance—induced by the repetition of the chants, the stars contemplated from the mystical vision of the ancient Egyptian and Greek peoples—all have a place in her writings.

However, the world of Evie Ivy is also that of the senses and of the everyday, the things to which we do not normally pay attention, but which powerfully influence our lives, although we are not aware of it. The poet rescues, in memorable lines, moments that allude to the tactile, the aromas, the mirages that we prefer to ignore and the significant coincidences to which we should always be attentive.

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In this selection of poems by Peter Blaxill there are hints of comedy and tragedy, satire and farce, platonic or consummate romances; anecdotes, imagination, dialogues and reflections that intertwine with wordplays and literary forms, until reaching moments of tangible sublimity: the contradiction that poetry is expected to rip out from words to engage the reader in an indelible way.

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Carlos Santibáñez Andonegui (1954-2018) is, without a doubt, an unclassifiable poet. The combination of long and short verses, as well as their verbal richness, infuse his poetry with an electricity-charged rhythm. In addition, with the technique of a barely perceptible collage, he shows us the different faces of a polyhedron. Behind a tone which is often festive, parodic, or of a tender irony, there is the skill of a true master of verse.

The Fresco Technique is the most extensive posthumous anthology of this extraordinary poet.

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In On a Timeless Path, the title corresponds to the author's conviction that the time of poetry is not the past, the present or the future, but the moment that borders on eternity and, therefore, speaks of what is always happening. It gathers a selection of poems that go from love to death, achieving in excellent poetic images, such as the following:

“In the eternity of sea / the seagulls write / a history of sand / that the tide forgets.”

“And after a long walk / through a jungle of birds / on the brink of the early morning / from so much looking at myself in your eyes / I got lost in the sea.”

And

“¡Oh, Chronos! / Outburst of the days / let me take the breath of Aion / and the fleeting spark of Kairos / until our undeferred encounter / under the lintel of the necropolis.”

On a Timeless Path / Por un sendero sin tiempo bilingual edition, was translated from Spanish and edited by Roberto Mendoza Ayala and Arthur Gatti; it contains beautiful illustrations by the Mexican artist Joel Astreo, and it is the eleventh title in the "Bridges" series of bilingual poetry books edited in New York City by Darklight Publishing LLC.

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In Memory of the Kingdom, was first published by INBA-Joaquín Mortiz in 1994, and also translated into French as En mémoire du royaume (Écrits des Forges, Mantis Editors-Chihuahuan Institute of Culture, Quebec, 2009). In Memory of the Kingdom, allows us to estimate this poetry as some of the most captivating of México, for its rhythm that evokes the primitive tam-tam, as well as for its melodious lyricism, its rural allegories, its bucolic freshness, its seductive whisper, understanding of everyday life and its fine eroticism.

Baudelio Camarillo, amazed and amazing poet, given to the instantaneous similarities between all the things that reach eternity, shows the most surprising analogies between the beings of his sensitive experience and his fantasy, which confirm the conviction that Octavio Paz expresses in The Monkey Grammarian: “Analogy, universal transparency: seeing this in that, even more, this is that.” And under the full moon the poet whispers In Memory of the Kingdom:

“We are now at the riverside. / From this portion of the river, to the moonlight, / it is a necklace made of gold / that no one will pull off from our bosom.”

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Poetry is one of the best forms of celebration and ritual, of harmony with what exists and dialogue with what is; all the more so when it has Eros and Aphrodite as its subjects. Maribel (sea of skin) invites us through these leaves of her erotic tree to her intimate coven where she invokes pagan forces that we all know at least once in a while.

Maribel Arreola helps to keep opening the many paths that are necessary for the full rights of women to that which should never have been taken from them: pleasure and speech, the pleasure of speech, the speech of pleasure.

Ritual of Burning Flesh / Ritual de la carne en llamas, bilingual edition, is the ninth poetry book of Darklight's Bridges Series, which intends to connect two different cultures and languages that nevertheless share universal artistic values.

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María Ángeles Juárez Téllez is a daughter of the natural heart of México, where volcanoes and lava forged the landscape. In In the Fire of Time she rescues from the entrails of body and mind the flames that have tattooed her inside and out. Her poetic voice is clear, strong, beautiful and mature. She leaves in her wake many crackling traces, metaphors and verses of fire. They are evidence that shows us where we must look to find her.

Buy it here: [amazon.com] [amazon.com.mx]

Throughout his life, Arthur Gatti has acquainted himself with characters and places—currents that make up the body of contemporary American counterculture and pop culture. He writes poems with a devilish intent to engage the reader in their intricate verbal labyrinths, complex analogies rising from the page like concentric clouds happily illuminated by the digital glimmers of the impatient New York night.

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Conjunction of floral (vertical) vegetality and amphibian (horizontal) animality, celebration of the mythical and human duality, the translational and rotational movement of the poems of Axolotl Constellation is a concentric trip without return of the poet inside himself, and an eccentric flight in the flesh of the woman, the place of writing where the everlasting carnal passions of the poet tattoo the perennial traces of his amatory and vital transmutation.

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Iliana Rodríguez can read and draw with words the elusive messages that draws in the streets the night “of long avenues / as expectations”; the trees, whose “mineral blood drags / the dark secrets”; the wind, which destroys and transforms; and even the inhabitants of the city, who turn into figures. The poet writes: “I would like to decipher / the ideogram of my palm: / the sign that defines. / Then I watch my hand / tracing / these words / with its brush.” Iliana Rodríguez, a growing voice in the poetry of México, makes the signs of the city and the world turn around in her threshold of water and light, in these poems.

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Bernard Block addresses injustice, poverty or discrimination, attempting to touch us and arouse us to profound issues otherwise buried in the avalanche of “breaking news”. The brightness of his language illuminates and dignifies the victims of tragic events, leaving a trail of sparks that lasts beyond the poem.

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The attribute of the misfit is to live out of time and against the current; Raúl Casamadrid insists on exercising such a strange way of life. Raúl composes at his own pace, standing. He refuses to be the demiurge poet, the architect, the little god who ruminates about boring immortality. He has chosen to be the man of the street who writes poems that are not the luxury object of the bourgeois but, as the anti-poet says, they are “a product of prime necessity.”

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As a professional dancer, Jessica Nooney could leap very high and stay in the air for a long time. She thinks those two elements show up in her poetry thirty years later. Her poetry often deals with women’s lives. Jessica Nooney believes that the more we acknowledge and name the specific actions and feelings of women’s lives, the better our situation will be in the world. She also believes that if this planet is to survive, women need to be as powerful as men and that it’s time for men to be held accountable for their personal and collective crimes against women.

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Amidst Water and Mud (The decomposition of a dream, in 50 fragments) is the first poetry book by Héctor García Moreno. In this he balances all of his plastic and architectural experience to build an ancestral house made of words that combine textures, materials and the primary functions of a building as an analogy of the human body from inception to decadence, recreating the stages of its biological and emotional cycle.

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