Selected Poems - Urbina

Luis Urbina wrote poetry that aches with longing and beauty. Drawn from collections published between 1916 and 1925, these Selected Poems capture a Mexico both vanishing and eternally present, a land of tender landscapes, lost loves, and the particular melancholy of modernity encroaching on an older world. Urbina was no mere nostalgist; his modernism pulses beneath the romantic surface, restless and formally sophisticated, yet never abandoning the sensuous immediacy that made his verses sing in the streets of Mexico City and beyond. As director of the National Library, he became a keeper of his nation's literary memory, but these poems reveal him as something more vital: a poet who refused to let beauty go quietly. The translations gathered here, by Alice Stone Blackwell, Muna Lee, Thomas Walsh, and Laurence Greenough, attempt to preserve the musicality of his lines in English, that most musical of languages. For readers who crave poetry with blood in its veins, who want verses that feel like late afternoons in Mexican towns or the particular ache of remembering what cannot return, Urbina remains essential.