salt publishing, earthworks series, 2015
The Art of Keeping Quiet is the first anthology in English translation by Rodolfo Alonso, one of today's most renowned Argentine poets. As early as 1956, Raúl Gustavo Aguirre noted in Alonso "a surprising verbal command, where the conquests of modern poetry meld into the terrain of language, while still respecting the structure and spirit of quotidian expression." Fifty years later, Juan Gelman praised "this crystalline voice that has celebrated existence, giving its expression an essential structure like an expanding spiral. Beauty turns these poems into music; they're engraved with a formal, imaginative, and conceptual rigor that is exceptional." Alonso's poetry is, in short, a radical questioning of solipsism, an exemplary search for the other. A poetry aware of itself, its reaches and limits, always seeking to be reinvented. A poetry that serenely unites aesthetic commitment and the social vanguard.