cover image Meanwhile Take My Hand

Meanwhile Take My Hand

Kirmen Uribe. Graywolf Press, $14 (129pp) ISBN 978-1-55597-458-9

Uribe is a big fish in a small pond: the serious and energetic young poet stands among the leading contemporary writers in Basque (Euskara), the language spoken and written in Uribe's ethnically distinct region of Spain. Though published verse in Basque began in the Renaissance, Uribe's own work looks decidedly contemporary, a sometimes laconic, sometimes effusive free verse open to emotional extremes: in ""Cardiogram"" a heart resembles ""a frozen lake,"" where ""the face of the child that he once was/ is erasing itself in there."" A superb love poem recalls ""that epoch when we slept holding each other,/ scared tiger cubs in our vigil""; one of several poems set in the harsh coastal landscape of Uribe's youth advises us that ""the moment/ you start to worry, life escapes you."" Quoting accessible English-language influences from Anne Sexton to Dylan Thomas, Uribe takes on topics local and universal, from sexual delight to drug addiction to the fate of minority languages: born in 1970, he manages to bring into his lines both the hip internationalism of his European generation and the commitment to particular villages, folkways and words that his language and his region own. Sensitively colloquial facing-page versions by Macklin (You've Just Been Told), a New Yorker who has lived in Bilbao, make this vivid collection the first book of verse ever translated directly (rather than via Spanish) from Basque to English.