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Cuban love letters
21st century poetry with Andy Croft

CUBA has always attracted the passionate sympathies of poets everywhere. “Cuba, my love, they put you on the rack,” wrote Pablo Neruda in Canto General, “cut your face, pried open your legs of pale gold, crushed your pomegranate sex, stabbed you with knives, dismembered you, burned you.”

The country’s national poets, Jose Marti and Nicolas Guillen, were revolutionaries and Che Guevara was also a poet.

After the fall of Batista, poets like Allen Ginsberg, Nazim Hikmet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Hans Magnus Enzensberger visited Cuba to write about the revolution.

  • Nothing Out Of This World: Cuban Poetry 1952–2000 is published by Smokestack Books, price £10.95, smokestack-books.co.uk
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