Dikter Och Misstag (Poems and Errors)
Jennifer Clement's writing is characterized by double worlds: an American and a Mexican, an English- and a Spanish-speaking one. The journey between two worlds and between two languages is a consistent theme. It is as if the fascination for the differences of the linguistic worlds is extended to the external reality and dreams.
Violence and death are constantly present in Clement, both in prose and in poetry, sometimes as an undertone, but often directly and written on the line. Here her Mexican heritage is clearly visible: evil sudden death coexists with heat and fantasy and colors and miracles.
"Poems and Mistakes" contains previously unpublished poems and has been added over the course of several years. The award-winning translator Niclas Hval has made the selection together with the author.
Jennifer Clement is best known in Sweden as a prose writer with the books "Prayers for the Stolen" (2014), "Widow Basquiat" (2016) and "Gun Love" (2019), and perhaps also because she until recently was PEN International's first female president. But she is basically a poet and made her debut in 1993 with the poetry collection "The Next Stranger", from which several of the poems in this book are taken.
New and Selected Poems
Jennifer Clement’s talent is authentic. She listens to her own words with respect and honesty, and she trusts and follows the authority of her own senses, her own images and their source.
W.S. Merwin
The Lady of the Broom is a poetic monologue based on the following:
“There is a circumstance in his (Michael Johnson’s) life somewhat romantick, but so well authenticated, that I shall not omit it. A young women of Leek, in Straffordshire, while he served his apprenticeship there, conceived a violent passion for him; and though it met with no favourable return, followed him to Lichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which he lived, and indulged her hopeless flame. When he was informed that it so preyed upon her mind that her life was in danger, he with a generous humanity went to her and offered to marry her, but it was then too late; her vital power was exhausted; and she actually exhibited one of the rare instances of dying for love. She was buried in the cathedral of Lichfield; and he, with tender regard, placed a stone over her grave with this inscription:
Here lies the body of
Mrs Elizabeth Blaney, a stranger.
She departed this life
20 of September, 1694”.
(From The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell.)
El marinero de Newton (Newton’s Sailor)
Introducción de Ramón Xirau/ Introduction by Ramón Xirau
El próximo extraño (The Next Stranger)
Presentación de W.S. Merwin
Introduction by W.S. Merwin