Eyes to See Otherwise is the first widely representative selection by Mexico’s greatest living poet to be published in a bilingual edition. The range and quality of the translations, by some of America’s finest poets, mark the centrality of his work on the map of modern poetry. Homero Aridjis’s sources range from Nahuatl chants and Huichol initiation songs to San Juan de la Cruz and the 16th-century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote. He is, in the words of translator George McWhirter, “a troubadour of love for lost environments, a voice in the wilderness of Mexico City and Mexico.” Included in this selection are poems by Aridjis evoking his own life, present and past, his memories always sticking close to his birthplace Contepec, where, on Altamirano Hill, the Monarch butterflies arrive each year. This long awaited Selected Poems enables the reader to witness, from the 1960 collection The Eyes of a Double Vision to new unpublished poems, the poetic and personal evolution of this “visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces” (Kenneth Rexroth).

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.”