Amongst the most ambitious and varied work of Pura Lopez Colome’s distinguished career, Speaking in Song displays the poet’s extraordinary range and musicality, conducting philosophical interrogations of the natural world-and one’s story, history, and place in it-in the context of hearing and memory, and in the form of song. Many of the poems have been set to music by composers from Mexico, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Pura Lopez Colome’s poems have an incandescent inwardness, of the kind that Marina Tsvetaeva said she found in the poems of Rilke. Whether she is speaking of the guava or the avocado, or the sea otter, or the movements of the soul, or the “unread places’ of the earth, her poems always feel to me like manuals on how to be fully alive. She is in that way a resource and a gift, and in this book, Dan Bellm’s English has caught her fire and her music almost exactly. -Robert Hass