Impossible Loves

This is the first substantial sampling in English of Colombia's greatest living poet, and it draws on five decades' work. Time has been Jaramillo's key theme, more intensely as he grows older. Impossible and lost loves are another theme. And violence, what it does to the human body. And absences, disappearances, are part of mix, all underpinned by a self-aware nostalgia for an idealised, rural childhood. The poems occur in places that are hard to pin down – anywheres – though some are set in Bogota, where the poet lives, and several in the tropical Antioquia region of the poet's childhood.And he interrogates the humble mango, the rubber tree, the domestic cat. Paradox lies at the core of his work: an only child, the poet's 'brothers' are often wild, chaotic characters, given to excess and self-destructive behaviour. "I like to hallucinate in words", he said when he won the National Poetry Award in 2017.The book includes a full afterword by the award-winning poet and writer Richard Gwyn, translator of the celebrated anthology "The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America" (2016).