Light and Shadows: Selected Poems and Prose

Rating:
Summary: If you read poetry, read this
Review: It is a great shame that so few people nowadays read poetry. I suspect that it was the way it was taught in most high school English classes that has turned off everyone except diehards like myself. There is a subtle joy about Jimenez, a way of seeing the magical in the simplest experience that sets him apart. Read this man. There is a reason why he won the Nobel Prize. He deserved it, which, sadly, is not something you can say about many of the recipients.

Rating:
Summary: I'D LIKE SOME MORE
Review: When I started getting into Spanish poetry the only real place I could go to read poets such as Juan Jimenez was my university library. You can't mark in library books though, well, I guess you can if you don't get caught, so I started combing bookstores for copies of my favorites. Besides Lorca, the great Spanish poets were non-existent on the bookshelves. Light and Shadows is an example of making do with a book even though it is a horrible representation of the poet Jimenez. The poems are great, I just needed more of them.

Jimenez is a poet who falls into the old cliche of the poet as a seeker of truth, the poet as a revealer who strips away the false surfaces of things and gets to the spiritual truth. In one poem, he says that he wishes poems, "like the sky, would yield at every moment all things" and that his greatest achievement would be to write a "naked book". He wants to get to the basic essence of all things. In one poem, "To Dante", he gives the ulitmate compliment to his fellow poet by writing "Your sonnet is like/ a nude and chaste woman/ who set me on her lap/ embracing me with her celestial arms". He is struggling for purity of mind, of emotion in all his poems.

Jimenez is no epic writer. He writes efficent short lyrical poetry for the most part. He is a great nature poet too, echoing more than once the feel and style of Japanese and Chinese haiku and epigrams. He is also a sensualist along the lines of John Keats. When he combines his nature and sense strains he is particularly effective.

The best work in this book is a series of prose poems taken from a diary he wrote while he was visiting New York City in which he comments on the vibe of the city and its hypocritic literati. There are too few of these entries included in this book. In fact, there's too few of everything. If his entire collected works weighed a ton, this representation would weigh an ounce.

That brings me to the problem of this book. In the prologue, the editor says that he is producing this book because not enough of Jimenez's work is available to the english reading public. Originally, he had produced a pamphlet of 14 poems. After reading this book, the problem still remains. This book is really nothing more than a pamphlet in my mind. It contains 47 pages of poetry and and the other 20 pages are excerpts from Platero and I, a prose piece about a boy and his donkey. Personally, the inclusion of Platero is needless. I wanted more poems.

The poems that are in here are quite good but there's just simply not enough of them. Jimenez wrote poems for 50 years and this is the best you can do, include the equivalent of maybe 2 poems for every year of his life? Looking on Amazon, I see much more promising editions of his work, so maybe they will be more satisfying than this teaser of a book. Demand more than this.