Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry

Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry. David Shook & Víctor Terán, ed. Los Angeles. Phoneme. 2015. 240 pages.

While exiled in Madrid, the hypercosmopolitan poet Alfonso Reyes wrote Visión de Anáhuac, 1519 (1915), an exquisite narrative of Tenochtitlán and its conquest by the Spaniards. In 1957 Octavio Paz finished his masterpiece, Piedra de sol, a poem whose circular structure and hendecasyllables allude to the orbit of Quetzalcoatl (Venus). The philosopher Miguel León Portilla published Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares in 1961, translations from indigenous poems popular to this day. Many Mexican poets, however, express ambivalence or disdain for contemporary poetry written in Zapotec, Nahuatl, etc. Separate festivals are held for poetry written in indigenous tongues. Fewer pages are meted...