Di Brandt has surpassed herself in this extraordinary book, which hurls itself upon our desperate environmental, emotional, spiritual condition with fury and eloquence and headlong grace. The sequence "Hymns for Detroit," which sets German hymns the poet heard in her Mennonite farming childhood against "trans(e)lations" for that most damaged city, could make the angels weep. Everywhere, Walking to Mojácar makes us know how far we have gone toward catastrophe, and yet how much passion, imagination, intelligence, and-therefore, perhaps-hope remain. In a prose poem, Brandt asks, "Who knows what this new age will remember of us as it tells its tales and stories to its children?" May these poems be among them.
In Di Brandt's experiments across languages, and in the work of the translators who contribute to these pages, translation is the source of an astonishing poetics, where "joining procedures" are a principle of invention. This is a book of connections, where cities, landscapes, languages and poetic forms intermingle. Brandt's lyric voice expands the world, revealing the gaps between languages and memories to be a space where rich dramas unfold.
