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.

Praise for Where Words Like Monarchs Fly:

"The most important assembly of Mexican poetry in translation in three decades." (This Magazine) "This earthly vision of potential and possibility spoken through a strongly committed social conscience makes Where Words Like Monarchs Fly a testament to the vitality of poetry and the poetic spirit needed to break free from the current global paradigm of domination and exploitation. While Canadians and Mexicans are pitted together and against each other in the economic battles provoked by NAFTA and free market trends in general, Canadians now have in this anthology another aperture on Mexican perspectives that will strike a resonant chord in many readers." (Dr. Martha J. Nandorfy, Books in Canada)

"How rare and wonderful to read such exquisite translations of the new poetry of Mexico. This book is a gift just as the Monarch butterflies are a gift as they fly between our two countries, fragile wings, amazing distances to fly. My life was changed in the Sixties by the translations of poets like Neruda and Paz. Now we have these new voices and we are changed again." (Patrick Lane)

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.

George McWhirter's profile page

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