Standing against the visible landscape the mountainous volcanoes, the jungles and savannahs the seven trees conjured in these narrative poems by one of Latin America's masters also evoke another, more mysterious terrain. It is this other landscape, as invisible as poetry before it is written down but etched by history and animated by the collective memory of a people, that speaks through Pablo Antonio Cuadra s "Seven Trees against the Dying Light."

Storing experience as they exist, these tree-poems conserve local soil and memory in the place they inhabit. They are figures of life,...