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Marco Antonio Campos's work can be considered a response to the dialogic poetry that arose in Latin America beginning in the 1950s. The latter is characterized by radical disregard for solipsism, opposition to capitalism and neo-colonialism, opening up to popular culture, democratization of language, and formal experimentation. By contrast, in Campos's poems, like in many by his contemporaries, morality is given priority over politics, feeling over reason, plain style over experimentation. In his case, a displacement from time history and biography toward space city and home is carried out, and poetry becomes chronicle. Yet this reaction is normal, intrinsic to the evolution of Latin American poetry, self-aware and adamant in its refusal to stagnate. Accordingly, Campos's work is no less conscious of the other, no less socially participative or aesthetically restless than that of his immediate predecessors. As Roger Munier suggests, in the end, each of Campos's books debates "his relentlessly questioned identity," but in a different way that ultimately continues to be dialogic and to require an active reader.
List of contents
- Contents
- from Deaths and Disguises (1970-1974)
- Statement on Beginning
- Contradictio (VI)
- The Last One
- Historical Account
- There's a Place on the Banks of the Seine
- Wiedersehen
- from A Sign on the Sepulcher (1974-1977)
- One by One My Brothers Left . . .
- Match
- On the Beaches of Corfu
- You Could Hear the Sitar Behind the Wind
- That Voice in Piraeus
- from Monologues (1972-1992)
- Monologue (I)
- Monologue (IV)
- Ash on My Forehead (1978-1987)
- What We Understand as Night
- Europe 1972
- It Was Ninfa Santos and It Was Rome
- Encounter with Cesar Vallejo
- New York Interruptions (I)
- Spanish Sketches (I)
- Spanish Sketches (II)
- Remember
- In Zacatecas
- (morning)
- (midday)
- (evening)
- (night)
- The Wrong Way
- Evening in Sorrento
- Prayer
- Epitaph
- The Stranger's Farewells (1988-1996)
- The Modern Poets
- Arles 1996-Mixcoac 1966
- A Letter Too Late
- The Parents
- Crossing Rideau Street (Ottawa)
- Sankt Peter Kirche
- Winter in Vienna
- Cafe Korb
- Only in Samizdat
- July in Arles
- In the Hotel-Dieu (Van Gogh)
- Hopital de la Conception
- Zum Weissen Engel (Georg Trakl)
- Mexico (I)
- Against the Tide
- Gravestone
- Friday in Jerusalem (1997-2004)
- 8 Los Pinos Avenue
- Ermita Cinema
- The Student from 1966
- Burnt House
- Pardon the Sorrow
- Sonia in the Winter of '81
- Cephalonia
- I Was Here . . .
- Elegy for Philadelphia
- At the Banks of the Sea of Galilee
- Friday in Jerusalem
- In Ein Karem
- A Summer's Day in Montreal
- At the Old Port
- Between Two Squares (September 11, 1973-November 9, 2004)
- The Rebels
- Acuna
About the author
Marco Antonio Campos (Mexico City, 1949) is one of Latin America's key literary voices of the past thirty years. He is a multifaceted and internationally acclaimed author. He has published more than fifty books, including novels, short stories, essays, translations, and above all, poetry. He has received prizes and honors from Mexico, Spain, Chile, and France, where he is a member of the Académie Mallarmé. He is a Professor of Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has taught at numerous universities around the world. Friday in Jerusalem and Other Poems offers a selection from six of his books and is the first of its kind in English.
