si no hubieras ido/If only you hadn't gone

A poignant and humorous series of poems exploring the mental state and post-separation daily life of an obsessive-compulsive writer, as he addresses his absent partner. "As I read them I fell like an old tree gone in the roots. For a long time afterwards I remained still and stared at the sky, wondering what was broken. They are wonderful. They follow me around asking if I have seen what they have lost." -Glenn Colquhoun "The depth of these poems is in their directness, their assumption that candour in itself is an emotional force, as they offer as their driving conviction the daily glamour of appropriate use, love in the occasions of routine. This is a poetry that touches almost on elegy at one end of its scale, on celebration at its other. I don't know any other poetry written in New Zealand that does quite what these poems do, with their imperative of rapidly jotted notes, and yet that overarching confidence of sustaining form... And as we read them in English, how much depends on Roger Hickin's perfectly pitched translations, on their lucid accuracy and grace... I don't believe we can any longer talk about love poetry in New Zealand, or indeed about our contemporary poetry at large, without Rogelio Guedea now being a voice in that conversation." - Vincent O'Sullivan Mexican poet Rogelio Guedea is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, essays, narrative, interviews and translations, columnist for several Mexican newspapers and from 2005 until 2016 co-ordinator of the Spanish programme at the University of Otago, Dunedin. With translations by Roger Hickin.