A Note about Sources

THE POEMS gathered here come from three volumes. "De Casa de hablas/From House Made of Utterance" contains poems from the collection of the same name (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1991), which is a collection of the poet's work to that date. The poems in this first section of the book are not arranged chronologically; rather, they are arranged so as to make, together with the other three sections of the book, a thematically coherent whole. "De Sonetos de todos mis sientos/From Sonnets out of All My Seasons" contains a dozen poems taken from the thirty-nine numbered parts, which were written between 1970 and 1989: those numbered 3, 5, 7, 18, 19, 23, 25, 29, 31, 35, 36, and 39. Next come six poems culled from Albatros (Merida: Universidad de los Andes, 1992). The final section includes four poems taken from the as yet unpublished Autobiografía en tercetos. Poems selected for the book include sonetos and tercetos as well as poems in verso libre, short poems as well as longer ones. For reasons of space and proportion, some lovely lengthy sections of the Autobiografía were passed over for briefer ones. The poems from Albatros follow the order of the book they were chosen from; so too do the poems from the Autobigrafía-except that the last poem in this collection is the opening poem of the book it comes from.

My earlier English versions of three poems-"La poetisa cuenta hasta cien y se retira," and two of the Sonetos de todos mis tiempos (numbers 5 and 7)-appeared, together with the Spanish originals, in a bilingual volume of the International Poetry Review (Spring 1998).