The Afternoon of the Elephant and Other Poems

How lucky we are to have this volume of Luis Benitez's poems in English! A major figure in contemporary Spanish-language literature, Benitez does not merely make poems; he thinks in poetry. The poems in The Afternoon of the Elephant are a way of reflecting on the physical and social world at the same time as they make that world real by considering animals, oceans, friends and lovers, the sabretooth tiger, the heron, the salmon, the trout, the skunk, even the escaped elephant who interrupts our mundane conversations and eats fruit from the café table. The Afternoon of the Elephant and Other Poems destroy the habitual and ask us to consider the way thought enriches experience and restores our awareness of the breadth of the world outside ourselves. Benitez is a voice in these pages, a passionate reason that rejects the meanness that walks through our everyday lives, that celebrates what is overlooked. George Franklin (poet)