Morales, Arqueles

Santa Cruz. 1974. Green Horse One. 1st American Edition.One Thousand copies printed by Wesley Tanner, Berkeley. Very Good in Wrappers. Translated from the Spanish by William Greenwood. 55 pages. paperback. Cover: Drawing by Robert Baldock. . keywords: Poetry Translated Latin America Guatemala Literature. FROM THE PUBLISHER - An epidemic strikes a nameless western city. No one is immune. Like any other disease, it is invisible. We see only the symptom: paleness. We have become the diagnosticians and the disease isn't hard to guess. It is a clarity that comes by surprise, the clarity of having illusions stripped away. Here disease is the first sign of possible health. In his poetry Arqueles Morales takes great pains to expose illusion. His own life becomes a laboratory in which he questions and searches. One of the first illusions he breaks down is the attitude that the self can be separated from the world in which it lives. Public events can be the terms of inner life. These poems were written between 1965 and 1971 when Morales was living in Germany and Cuba, in exile from his native Guatemala. During that time the Guatemalan government was engaged in a bloody ‘pacification' campaign which resembled the one the U.S. government was waging. The present government is a continuation of the U.S.-sponsored military coup him 1954 began the reversal of a ten-year period of progressive reform. The Guatemalan writers who came of age during the past 20 years have been called the ‘Generation of Violence.' They are part of a poetic tradition that has grown out of struggles for national liberation, a tradition in which guerrilla-poets have been an important example. inventory #3612