Bay of Flags & other poems

A distinguished art gallery director, and curator of major exhibitions by some of the art world’s most celebrated names, Enrique Juncosa is also a much-admired poet in his native Spanish. Bay of Flags & other poems draws on the two most recent of his six Spanish publications and introduces English language readers to what translator Michael Smith in his Introduction calls “a boundless curiosity about other people and places, an astonishingly broad interest in most of the major art forms, and an enthusiasm to experiment that matches the novelty of what he has encountered on his travels”. Formally energetic, Juncosa’s poetry reveals what the poet himself terms “a certain obsession with lists and proper names, of people and places” – as well as a focus on the external world that will hold the reader’s attention throughout even where it refuses linear narrative or tidy conclusion. “Ultimately,” as Michael Smith puts it, “the poems are celebratory, of the world in all its incomprehensible strangeness and its beauty.”