Gazing Through Water

Gazing Through Water is a collection of poems by Brazilian writer and environmentalist Astrid Cabral. The poet confronts the personal imprint of time and age on herself and those around her, staking her claim for life on memory and words themselves, as she wrestles against loss and tragedy. Having grown up on the banks of the greatest river on earth, the Amazon, she naturally sees time incarnated in the river's muddy flow, to which she returns again and again. At first, the remembered river appears in its fecundity, but later what dominates is its inexorable flow to the sea. This volume, constructed from poems drawn from three collections--Gazing Through Water, The Waiting Room, and Intimate Soot--is Cabral's declaration of the poet's purpose in this uneven battle we all ultimately confront. With memory, she struggles to salvage the past, and with words she strives to give new substance, a cry of affirmation, to what has vanished.

Astrid Cabral has won numerous literary awards in Brazil and her work has been included in over sixty anthologies. Among her twenty books are the collections Gazing Through Water, Cage, The Waiting Room, Word in the Spotlight, and Intimate Soot. She is also the translator of Thoreau's Walden into Portuguese. Her poems have appeared in magazines throughout the United States, including Bitter Oleander, Catamaran, Cincinnati Review, Confrontation, Dirty Goat, Osiris, Per Contra, and Poetry East. Cage, Amazonian animal poems translated by Alexis Levitin, was published by Host Publications in 2008.

Alexis Levitin has published forty-seven books in translation, mostly poetry from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. In addition to five books by Salgado Maranhão, his work includes Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil and has held translation residencies at the Banff Center, Canada, The European Translators Collegium in Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.

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