The Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who was born in the eastern province of Camaguey in 1902, died in 1989. This new edition of his selected poems, reissued thirty years after its original publication, includes an extensive, new introductory essay by Roberto Marquez, one of the original translators and a leading authority on Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture."

Caribbean literature and culture have all too often been viewed in fragmented terms, without attention to the broader commonalities of the region. In this collection of essays written over many years, Roberto Marquez offers a more encompassing vision, one that respects the individual traditions of particular locales, languages, and cultures but also sees the larger themes that bind the area's literary heritage and history. Marquez begins by making the case for a genuinely Caribbean literary criticism, one that moves beyond the colonial history of fragmentation and isolation and the...