Heaven

A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. This is the first translation of Spanish poet Manuel Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into freewheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The poet James Womack has won prizes for his versions of Vilas's work, and of Mayakovsky's. Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map, across land and water, and between romances. His tact and instinct for rhythm and detail give the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak, bluntly and with black humour, always alert for the fantastic.