Blends French and English, Love and Nature, Perfectly
September 3, 2007
Helene Cardona
This lovely book of poems came into my life just as I am committing myself to spending the next twenty years as intelligence officer to the poor. We are going to create a global free public grid for early warning and decision support and free multilingual education “one cell call at a time,” with a prioritization of needs able to influence three trillion dollars a year: the trillion that foundations give out willy-nilly; the trillion in corporate services that can profit from going green; and the trillion now spent on war that we can over time, through public education, redirect toward waging peace.
This volume is especially valuable to me not just for its open and peaceful thoughts, but because it was written in English, translated into French, and the facing pages offer the poem in French to the left and English to the right. I can think of no finer way to begin my long road back to mastery of the language of diplomacy, than by ensuring I read one poem a night, in both languages, for a very long time to come.
El Recuerdo (the Memory) is already a favorite within this volume.
See also the volume by Philip Levine that I have carried with me all these years that will now be joined by The Astonished Universe:
7 years from somewhere: Poems
