Translations from Silence

3.5/5 ( ratings)

Winner of the 2010 PEN Oakland poetry book award.
with an introduction by Jack Hirschman

“Clif Ross is among the most highly respected activists of the Left Coast… His own poetry, a generation of works, is here warmly presented in the context of a maturation of tone and voice that is quietly remarkable--and very much like himself. Ross is a fusion of a lyric realism and the power of metaphor. His voice isn't of the plosive kind. He writes an organic lyric, resisting any attempt on the part of the "Poet" in himself to overcome himself by a kind of verbal oblivion. His poems are expressions of his determination that friendship triumphs through beautiful communications that make one feel solidarity without feeling one's being indoctrinated or recruited.” Jack Hirschman Poet Laureate of San Francisco from the introduction to the English edition.
“Translations from Silence is a powerful and evocative journey through the belly of the Beast and beyond, led by a wise and love-scarred traveler whose eyes and heart have been burned open, as were this reader's through the course of her journey.” Elizabeth Claman  “Between the plastic instant of William Carlos Williams and the sumptuous melancholy of Eliot, in an experiential flow or in epigrammatic instants, sometimes a voyage, sometimes a chronicle of observation, and sometimes brief, ironic fiction: fluid and insistent, or concise and self-contained like snapshots or cartoons, from the embraced idea to the material, all this is taken up in the language of Clifton Ross's poetry.” Juan Antonio Calzadilla Arreaza from the introduction to the Spanish translation published in Venezuela