Christopher Maurer

A cherished erotic play by Federico García Lorca, illustrated by a major Spanish artist. Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca, as Fernando Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain’s most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca’s haunting play about the wounds of love. The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, an “erotic allelujia” which Lorca once called his most cherished play, was shut down in 1928 by Spanish government censors who confiscated the manuscript and locked it away in the pornography section of a state archive. Lorca rewrote the work in New York, and an amateur theater group brought it to the Spanish stage a few years later. Since his death, the play has also been transformed into ballet and opera. Zóbel Reads Lorca presents Zóbel’s previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zóbel’s development as a painter, Luis Fernández Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zóbel’s Harvard and throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Christopher Maurer delves into musical and visual aspects of the play’s American productions.

New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli. This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the “red midnight sun” of hope. Belli’s contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its “azure cloister.” Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli’s original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This bilingual edition also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish.

Leif Anderson's Dancing with My Father is both a loving tribute to her unusual and famous father, Mississippi artist Walter Anderson, and an honest look at the effects he has had upon her personal life and her artistry. Due to Walter Anderson's erratic behavior and recurring absences, Leif Anderson experienced a difficult childhood. Never comfortable with home and fatherhood, Walter Anderson often affected family life as an alien and fearful force. Through her lyrical vignettes, Leif Anderson gradually comes to accept and, in the end, to cherish the artist's intense presence and his influence on her dance and her performance art. The slices of life in Dancing with My Father describe encounters both awkward and endearing, express a daughter's frustrated longing for a father's attention, and give insight into Walter Anderson's struggles. Leif Anderson reveals how her burdens-the urge to abandon the ""normal"" world and the tug of familial expectations-closely match those of Walter Anderson and how this realization helps her to comprehend him. In one vignette, she tells vividly of his solitary dancing. In another, she recounts her mother's story of Walter Anderson dancing with infant Leif in his arms. Leif Anderson reflects upon her father's love for birds and sees her talent as a way of representing those very birds. She begins to sympathize with his frequent escapes to Horn Island, knowing her own need for a haven that nurtures solitude and artistic expression. Many previously unrevealed glimpses of Walter Anderson as artist, naturalist, husband, and father are offered throughout the book. In his foreword Christopher Maurer, Walter Anderson's biographer, puts the relationship in context. Brush and ink drawings by both Walter Anderson and Leif Anderson draw the eye further into the author's vision of making peace with a paternal legacy of brilliance and pain. Dancing with My Father grapples wisely and firmly with two artists' lives and is a poignant portrayal of forgiveness, acceptance, and reconciliation for both daughter and father.

Almost a century ago, Annette McConnell Anderson, a New Orleans society woman, vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husband---a grain merchant---she bought twenty-eight acres of woodland on the Mississippi Sound. Beside a sleepy bayou, in the shade of towering pines and magnolias, she opened an art colony, one of the first of its kind in the South. Backed by his mother's passion for art, her oldest son Peter Anderson founded Shearwater Pottery. Yearning ""to make Shearwater synonymous with perfection,"" he drew the entire family into his adventure. His brothers, ""Mac"" and Walter, made strange, wonderful pieces, though Walter Anderson eventually left the pottery studio to search for his own artistic path. Drawn by the exquisite work of Shearwater Pottery, the authors discover that painting, poetry, and storytelling---much of it by strong, unforgettable women---are still an essential part of the family's daily life. Intimate diaries, letters, and poems lead the reader into a stormy, passionate, sometimes heartbreaking past. Meticulously researched and compassionately written, Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi gathers one family's eternal legacy of wisdom and beauty, the healing power of art, the consolations of writing and of memory, and the spiritual treasures given us by the natural world.