Silvina Ocampo

Silvina Ocampo possessed her own special enchantment as a poet. For fifty years she was associated with prominent literary and artistic personalities in Buenos Aires, and content to live as a famous unknown far from the public eye, writing furiously, hiding her work, gradually publishing several books of poetry and fiction, and eventually winning all of her country’s major literary prizes. Only now is her extraordinary achievement as a poet becoming more widely recognized beyond Latin America. Ocampo’s poetry occupies a mythical, enigmatic space with its meditations on love’s travails, intuitions of kinship between plant and animal realms, and inquiries into place and family and memory. This is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English and displays the full range of her production-from her first published book in 1942 to her last in 1972, from her early sonnets on native landscape and history to her explorations of myth and classical history and love’s depths, as well as the metaphysical turn in her later verse.