Songs of Mute Eagles
-represents the second in an ongoing series of bilingual poetry collections published by Darklight Publishing LLC.
Arthur Gatti, the poet whose work fills this rich book of images, is a New Yorker in every sense of the word. Throughout his life, he has acquainted himself with characters and places-currents that make up the body of contemporary American counterculture and pop culture. And, like many American journalists and writers, he has traveled his country chasing ideas, jobs and romance, while accumulating images and priceless experiences that over the years he has turned into poems.
In this book there are tributes to the artistic currents from which the author was nourished - the "macho" poets Rudyard Kipling and Robert Service, Japanese haiku, Jack Kerouac and jazz music- as well as loving reflections on moments that move us just for being human.
Art Gatti's poems exude the city, losses and reunions, observations of the tiny and the grandiose, the mournful evocation of the extinct, and they have a smoldering predilection for iconoclastic chaos.
Gatti reflects several facets of the contemporary Renaissance man, writing poems with a devilish intent to engage the reader in their intricate verbal labyrinths, with complex analogies of double and triple meanings rising from the page like concentric clouds.
Here are a few lines of Art Gatti's poem
Small Daily Ration of Sunlight
In darkness, all my familiar tones are a pallet/ inside a dark membrane/ that pulsates/ and tries to burst into some life force/ that is just a shadowy midmorning dream/ and can never be. And his poem, Red Song: The wail of some jazz man's horn/ reaches over the twilight/ weaving through brittle branches- dead apple trees of my blood's yearnings- to me/ in this cold and dying ember/ fireplace room where/ my face suddenly glows hotly/ thinking of you.
DARKLIGHT PUBLISHING LLC, was established in New York City to disseminate the poetic work of American and Latin American authors through bilingual editions. Translation and editing is in the capable hands of teams of poets in Mexico and the United States.
The bilingual "Bridges" series was conceived by writers from both countries based on their knowledge of poetry as a genre, as well as an interest in their own language in relation to the other, and its books will include contemporary authors seeking readers that move through our geographic hemisphere in physical or virtual ways, and throughout our neighboring countries, where there is a broad exchange between the English and Spanish languages.
"Songs of Mute Eagles", bilingual edition, was translated into Spanish and edited by Arthur Gatti and Roberto Mendoza Ayala; it contains beautiful illustrations by Laurie Anderson, Antonio Carmelo Gatti, Michael Hartnett, Alethea Maguire-Cruz and Paul Oratofsky, and has a cover designed by the graphic artist Alonso Venegas Gómez based on an illustration by Alethea Maguire-Cruz.