Elsa Cross (b. 1946) is one of Mexico's most significant contemporary poets, and this is the first full-length collection of her work in English-a long overdue but welcome opportunity for Anglo-American readers to get a sense of the full breadth of her work. The work selected for this volume concentrates on her longer poems, which are at the core of Elsa Cross' work-ranging from the remarkable 'Bacchantes', dating from the late '70s and early '80s and offered here in full, through 'Malabar Canto'-suffused with the spirit of India-and the Mesoamerican world of the Jaguar poems, to the odes,...

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated by Anamaria Crowe Serrano. BEYOND THE SEA brings together two book-length sequences first published in Mexico in the early years of the century, both taking their origins from Greece, a matter of central importance for the poet for many years. Fittingly, for subject-matter thoroughly drenched in the Greek past, the poems are odes and dithyrambs; the gods are there, imagery that has echoed across the centuries is here transposed into a limpid modern Mexican poetry, composed with the lightest of touches. Here the Mayans of Bonampak meet the Minoans of...

Amorgos Notebook is a collection from 2007 that won for Elsa Cross Mexico's most prestigious poetry prize. Elsa Cross' work over the past several decades has demonstrated a fascination with Greece, and this sequence takes its departure from the island of Amorgos, in the Cyclades, home of remarkable ancient sculptures, and spectacular terrain.