Mark Statman Books
Exile Home
"…a love poem, a snapshot, to the poet’s adopted country…. The air, the light, the poignancy of little girl with wooden bowl, & mystery of life next to another, a beloved partner, buzz with sharp grace.” —Anne Waldman
https://www.lavenderink.org/site/shop/exile-home/?v=0b98720dcb2c
Never Made In America: Selected Poems from Martín Barea Mattos
From their particular spatial arrangements to their incantatory sound-repetitions, Martín Barea Mattos’ poems come to us with airs of specific lanes and gardens. In Mark Statman’s elegant translations, Barea Mattos’ poems gain new life—the life of “leftover material / memorial garbage dumps”. At times concrete, at others aerial, Barea Mattos’ poetry always keeps alive the consciousness of one human being, in words culled, as treasures, from daily use. Poetry is the beneficiary, and so are we, its readers.
—Vincent Katz
That Train Again
…an admirably light touch illuminates the seriousness behind the poems…
–Tony Towle
The poems are lyrical, deft, quietly smart, and admirably quotidian.
–Charles North
From dead flowers to suddenly blue starlings, from possibly green herons to lions that will not sleep tonight, Mark Statman’s new volume bursts with the abundance of the natural world, laced by the estranging light of the imagination. The bursts of lyric ecstasy are so unforced, proceed from such a brimming-over of natural admiration, that to read this book is to skip across a field, alighting always on pebbles of joy. That is Statman’s most celebratory, most accessible book.
–Nicholas Bims (Amazon Review)
https://www.lavenderink.org/site/shop/that-train-again/?v=0b98720dcb2c
A Map of the Winds
A Map of the Winds is a lovely book, filled with moments of ordinary perception given uncommon attention. Sung through a register of gentle if unrelenting consciousness on the part of the poet that the present is always inexhaustibly on the move, Statman’s spare, concise, searching poems channel notations of experience through the visual and aural senses to frame and extend “voice that stands for voice / captures what I want and need / not resemblance”. That necessary sense of voicing-as-one-goes in order to handle uncertainty as a point of thematic variation finds its ground in an expansive set of locations: Brooklyn, Mexico, Colombia, the Catskill Mountains. And always at once the recognition and curiosity of “language again giving him / a place for the world”. —Anselm Berrigan
How delightfully apt that A Map of the Winds is “a gift” from Mark Statman’s son, or is it Statman’s gift to his son? Such are the riddles tenderly offered us in this book, koans with duende that befit the international scope of a consummate poet-translator. His voice brings together historical awareness with mindful surrender to the present moment (that sometime calls back memories from the psyche’s depths). Whether the observer is with his wife or son, bird-watching in a cottage, or on the streets of Brooklyn or Bogota, Mark Statman’s lines are maps of the wind that carry us into wonder and love.
--Aliki Barnstone
https://www.lavenderink.org/site/shop/map-of-the-winds-a/?v=0b98720dcb2c
Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa
Black Tulips is a selection from the poetry of Jose Maria Hinojosa, the first English translation of a well-known poet of Spain's famed Generation of '27, which included Lorca, Dalí, Buñuel, Alberti, Aleixandre and Hernandez. His right wing politics caused him to break with the group during the Spanish Republic. He was assassinated by Republican sympathizers in 1936 and his writing disappeared from Spanish culture until the end of the 20th century.
Tourist at a Miracle (Poems)
"It's very rare to watch the birth of a new style. It's like watching through a new set of Proust's kaleidoscopes. Mark Statman has been working for years on a vision of himself and parts of the city concentrated and bare as any poetry. It's hard to compare it to anything except a commentary on the real and the imagined pointillist poems almost without figures and adjectives and false decorations. But it all adds up, like a fire hydrant taken by Rudy Burkhardt, because everything is unexaggerated, convincing as a street sign. He has gotten away from any lyric leftovers, and in his anti-anti-poems he makes a lot of magic and music out of elegies of a city mouse. He has a family, a loved wife, and son, and a past he has a constant politics and is not seduced by the political. He makes us bewildered tourists at his everyday miracle"--David Shapiro.
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Poet in New York
“The definitive version of Lorca’s masterpiece, in language that is as alive and molten today as was the original.”—John Ashbery
Newly translated for the first time in ten years, Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is an astonishing depiction of a tumultuous metropolis that changed the course of poetic expression in both Spain and the Americas. Written during Lorca’s nine months at Columbia University at the beginning of the Great Depression, Poet in New York is widely considered one of the most important books Lorca produced. This influential collection portrays a New York City populated with poverty, racism, social turbulence, and solitude—a New York intoxicating in its vitality and beauty. After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, poets Pablo Medina and Mark Statman were struck by how closely this seventy-year-old work spoke to the atmosphere of New York. They were compelled to create a new English version using a contemporary poet’s eye, which upholds Lorca’s surrealistic technique, mesmerizing complexity, and fierce emotion unlike any other translation to date. A defining work of modern literature, Poet in New York is a thrilling exposition of one American city that continues to change our perspective on the world around us.
https://www.amazon.com/Poet-York-Federico-Garcia-Lorca/dp/0802143539/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2
Bio
Mark Statman’s newest book of poems is Exile Home (Lavender Ink, 2019). Statman’s poetry collections include That Train Again (Lavender Ink, 2015), A Map of the Winds (Lavender Ink, 2013) and Tourist at a Miracle( Hanging Loose, 2010). His translations include Never Made in America: Selected Poetry of Martín Barea Mattos (Lavender Ink/diálogos, 2017). Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), the first English language translation of the significant poet of Spain’s Generation of 1927, and, with Pablo Medina, a translation of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York (Grove 2008). Other books include Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry (Teachers & Writers, 2000), The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (with Christian McEwen, Teachers & Writers, 2000), and The Red Skyline: Poems (Work and Lives, 1988).
Statman’s poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in sixteen anthologies, as well as such publications as New American Writing, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Ping Pong, Xavier Review, and American Poetry Review. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the National Writers Project, he is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and lives in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca and Oaxaca de Juárez, MX.