CHARLES TOMLINSON

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinsons poetry: He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life. Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw the world as event... He is fascinated with his eyes open: a lucid fascination by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things. Tomlinsons take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of sensuous cerebration as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.

Charles Tomlinson declares that this book, emerging from the practice, the art and magic of translation, concerns itself with 'the way certain fables of metamorphosis have captured the poetic imagination and how translation - literary metamorphosis - extends this process'. He takes the syntax and diction of the prose of John Ruskin, so important to the evolution of Proust's prose style, as offering an example of the way visual experience, in Ruskin's art criticism, can suggest certain methods of approach to the poet, a technique whereby what is seen directly feeds what is said and how the saying takes shape. Metamorphoses demonstrates, with a wealth of examples and close readings, how poetry itself is a form of metamorphosis, raw materials being transformed and realised though literary expression and technique. Tomlinson's own poetic achievement - evinced in more than twenty books of poems, and also in his groundbreaking translations from Spanish, Russian, French and other languages - informs much that these essays describe. Here readers will find a major poet reflecting on the core and timeless elements of the poetic craft.

Los poemas reunidos en este volumen sintetizan más de medio siglo de dedicación a la poesía y vienen a decirnos que no hay diferencia, palabra mediante, entre hallar nuestro lugar en el mundo y que el mundo encuentre un lugar entre nosotros.