'Where Words Like Monarchs Fly' brings Mexican poetry to the fullness of its senses in English with all the music of the meaning, richness of metaphor and humour. It introduces Jose Emilio Pacheco, Gabriel Zaid, Homero Aridjis and Elsa Cross-born in the thirties and the forties-along with the fifties generation they have inspired. Covering twenty-five years of development and ten poets in full representation by each, this book is essential for understanding the immediacies of new Mexican verse. In translation by prize-winning Canadian poets Kate Braid, Sylvia Dorling, George McWhirter, Caroline Davis Goodwin, Karen Cooper, Arthur Lipman, Iona Whishaw and Raul Peschiera, the English versions have already attracted a wide readership in 'The New Republic', 'Modern Poetry in Translation', 'PRISM international', 'London Magazine' and others.

"The original material shone through as fresh, biting analyses of the world that the poets live in. Some of hem followed me around for days..." - Broken Pencil

Born in 1939 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, George McWhirter grew up on the Shankill Road. He attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where his classmates included Seamus Heaney, and later completed a Masters degree at the University of British Columbia. McWhirter lived in Spain from 1965 to 1966, when he moved to Canada where he taught high school in Port Alberni, making an abrupt transition from Barcelona to living in a log cabin by Sproat Lake. He is the author of twenty books, many of which have won major awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the MacMillan Prize for Poetry, the Canadian Chapbook Poetry Competition Winner, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the FR Scott Prize for Translation. In 2005, George McWhirter retired as a professor in the Creative Writing Department at UBC. In 2007 he was inaugurated as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.

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George McWhirter is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and fiction. His translation of selected poems by Jose Emilio Pacheco won him the F.R. Scott Prize for translation. Mr. McWhirter's collection, Catalan Poems, shared the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and his novel, Cage, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 1987.

Veronika Volkow's profile page

Victor Manuel Mendiola is on of the ten poets represented in Where Words Like Monarchs Fly, published by Anvil Press.

Victor Manuel Mendiola's profile page