Songs of Mute Eagles -represents the second in an ongoing series of bilingual poetry collections published by Darklight Publishing LLC.
Arthur
Gatti, the poet whose work fills this rich book of images, is a New
Yorker in every sense of the word. Throughout his life, he has
acquainted himself with characters and places--currents that make up the
body of contemporary American counterculture and pop culture. And, like
many American journalists and writers, he has traveled his country
chasing ideas, jobs and romance, while accumulating images and priceless
experiences that over the years he has turned into poems.
In
this book there are tributes to the artistic currents from which the
author was nourished --the "macho" poets Rudyard Kipling and Robert
Service, Japanese haiku, Jack Kerouac and jazz music-- as well as loving
reflections on moments that move us just for being human.
Art
Gatti's poems exude the city, losses and reunions, observations of the
tiny and the grandiose, the mournful evocation of the extinct, and they
have a smoldering predilection for iconoclastic chaos. Gatti reflects
several facets of the contemporary Renaissance man, writing poems with a
devilish intent to engage the reader in their intricate verbal
labyrinths, with complex analogies of double and triple meanings rising
from the page like concentric clouds.
Here are a few lines of Art Gatti's poem Small Daily Ration of Sunlight:
In darkness, all my familiar tones are a pallet
inside a dark membrane
that pulsates
and tries to burst into some life force
that is just a shadowy midmorning dream
and can never be
And his poem, Red Song:
The wail of some jazz man's horn
reaches over the twilight
weaving through brittle branches--
dead apple trees of my blood's yearnings--
to me
in this cold and dying ember
fireplace room where
my face suddenly glows hotly
thinking of you
Songs of Mute Eagles,
bilingual edition, is now available through amazon.com and was translated into Spanish and edited by Arthur
Gatti and Roberto Mendoza Ayala; it contains beautiful illustrations by
Laurie Anderson, Antonio Carmelo Gatti, Michael Hartnett, Alethea
Maguire-Cruz and Paul Oratofsky, and has a cover designed by the graphic
artist Alonso Venegas Gómez based on an illustration by Alethea
Maguire-Cruz.
Darklight Publishing LLC, was established in New York City to disseminate the poetic work of American and Latin American authors through bilingual editions. Translation and editing is in the capable hands of teams of poets in Mexico and the United States. The bilingual "Bridges" series was conceived by writers from both countries based on their knowledge of poetry as a genre, as well as an interest in their own language in relation to the other, and its catalogue will include contemporary authors seeking readers that move through our geographic hemisphere in physical or virtual ways, where there is a broad exchange between English and Spanish languages.
Roberto Mendoza Ayala
