Foreign Music

"The poems in Love Training are intimate in focus and scale: taut and contemplative, they ruminate on family, exile, romantic love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training, which gathers poems from several of Andrâes Neuman's books into a single unified collection, is divided into three sections. The first, the titular "Love Training," focuses on family (and its history), loss, relationships, love, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, "Fictions of Sight," are associated with questions of perception, perspective, and creativity. And the third, "I Don't Know Why" - which is the first phrase of every poem in the section - is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions; it serves as a kind of coda to the book. While Andrâes Neuman is a celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid, sensitive, incisive - and quite prolific - poet. Love Training is the first English translation of his poetry"--