Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of recent poems. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, Mexico’s oppressed, female saints, writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia, and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imagined landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes, “A poem is like a door /we’ve never passed through.” Now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. “Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,” he writes, “I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same.”
Contemporary Mexican-Greek poet, novelist, columnist, diplomat and environmental activist.
Aridjis’ work casts a beguiling spell that blurs the line between dreaming and waking.
— Chard deNiord, Harvard Review
Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence brings poet-translator George McWhirter’s adept English to the service of a great world-poet, Homero Aridjis. The book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding. A keynote is the sense of a person speaking with us plainly and yet from kinship with a light that bathes, and springs from, each thing.
— judges’ citation, 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize
A great flame passes through the words, the poetry, of Homero Aridjis, who sets reality alight in images that at once illuminate and consume it, making life a sister of dream. Homero is a great poet; our century has great need of him.
— Yves Bonnefoy
In his vast oeuvre, Aridjis has produced many works that confront apocalyptic times.
