“...this epic will be compared to Neruda’s Canto General... Heady stuff recommended for all levels of academic libraries.” -- Library Journal
“Cosmic Canticle arrives like songs from the darkness, questioning who we are and where we came from and keeping the tradition of the long poem alive. From its first cantiga, ‘Big Bang,’ in which Cardenal speculates upon our origins, to the here-and-now of later cantigas, he sees signs of hope: ‘This universe repeating itself after each Big Bang / to be better each time / until it becomes the perfect cosmos.’ In the last cantiga, ‘Omega,’ he calls out names and celebrates the relations of all humankind: ‘Love is the synthesis of the universe.’ This is, then, a book of faith—faith in humanity and in a creator. As the work of an ordained priest, this comes as no surprise, although Cardenal's continuing impulse to write such stunning poetry is ever a wonderful surprise.”--Raul Niño, American Library Association Booklist
“Cardenal’s epic is all-encompassing in its range of themes, theories, and descriptive passages that are full of power and insight into the wondrous nature of timespace, which has truly inspired this Nicaraguan to epic heights of poetic-scientific song.”--The Texas Observer
“Ernesto Cardenal continues the tradition of Pablo Neruda, who said, ‘all the pure poets will fall on their face in the snow.’ Cardenal’s poetry is impure, defiantly, in that it unites political ugliness and the beauty of imaginative vision.”--Robert Bly
“Ernesto Cardenal is one of the most important poets writing today. He is one of the giants, in the tradition of Neruda and Guillen. And like all those bearers of a truly human truly transforming art, he is deeply political, deeply committed to struggle, and absolutely clear that to be art, rather than ‘ain’t’, the song must be truth to be beauty.”--Amiri Baraka
“Get it, read it, and discover how, ‘The convergent force of the universe towards its center is love.’”--Multicultural Review
“Like Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from Chile, Cardenal combines politics and poetry while speaking forthrightly about the history of exploitation in the Americas.”--National Catholic Reporter
“This is much more than just another poet’s collection of singular verse: Cardenal spent over thirty years producing this epic, which relates Latin American history to the evolution of human understanding. [These] cantos are provocative creations.”--The Bookwatch
“Cosmic Canticle by Ernesto Cardenal fills me with wonder, with fascination, not only in its detail but also in its entirety.” -- José Coronel Urtecho
Written over a thirty year period, Cosmic Canticle is the crowning achievement of Ernesto Cardenal, one of the towering international figures in 20th century poetry. To try to define Cosmic Canticle — narrative poem, mythic song, epic — is to diminish its originality. Cardenal does no less than explore Latin American history by relating the evolution of the universe to the development of human understanding. Throughout, Cardenal blends the visible and invisible, science and poetry, the individual and society, religion and nature, in forty-three autonomous yet integrated cantos.
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