Reflections Through the Convex Mirror of Time / Reflexiones Tras El Espejo Convexo Del Tiempo

In this poignant bilingual collection, preeminent New Mexican poet E. A. “Tony” Mares posthumously shares his passionate journey into the broken heart and glimmering shadows of the Spanish Civil War, whose shock waves still resonate with the political upheavals of our own times. Mares engages in dialogue with heroes and demons, anarchists and cardinals, and beggars and poets. He takes us through the convex mirror of history to the blood-stained streets of Madrid, Guernica, and Barcelona. He interrogates the assassins of Federico García Lorca for their crimes against poetry and humanity.

Throughout the collection the narrator is participant and commentator, and his language is both lyrical and direct. In addition to Mares’s parallel Spanish and English poems, the book includes a prologue by Enrique Lamadrid, an introduction by Fernando Martín Pescador, and an epilogue by Susana Rivera. Lovingly shepherded and completed by friends and family, this book will appeal to Mares enthusiasts and readers interested in poetry and history, who will be glad to have this unexpected gift from a master’s voice.

In this tableau of poems, E. A. Tony Mares reconstructs the Spanish Civil War as the most iconic struggle of the twentieth century. Naming names, the poet tracks down and confronts the grand and petty players from all sides of that bloody conflict. From the refracted shards of language and the visceral, sensory details of the Spanish landscape, a towering vision emerges, leavened with the humility and humor that finally brings us home, to Tony’s home, Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza. Michael A. Thomas, author of Hat Dance