Title: SCARECROW
Author: Jaime Manrique
Translator: Eugene Richie and Edith Grossman
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

Introduction:

A number of Spanish and Latin American poets-Lorca Salinas, Villaurrutia, Cernuda, Paz, Padilla, Ulacia-have spenttime in North America, which is in many ways the cultural antithesis of all that we think of as Hispanic. Like the legendary salamander in the middle of the fire, Jamie Manrique has been able to survive and flourish in these environs for more than a decade now, writing his poetry and his novels (two of them in English) with wonderful fluency and delicate feeling. As a epigraph for his second novel Colombian Gold, he used lines from a poem of Jorge Manrique, the late medieval Spanish poet who is one of his literary if not indeed genetic ancestors as well. "Our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea of death," the poet said, and his descendant is also concerned with change and dissolution in human affairs, the inexorable glide toward extinction. But Jaime Manrique takes it at an amble, with time for memory and strokes in reverse as it approaches the falls.

Alfred Corn