Amorgos Notebook

Amorgos Notebook (Cuaderno de Amorgós) is a book-length sequence published in Mexico City in 2007, which won for the author Mexico’s most prestigious national poetry award, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. Amorgos is the easternmost island in the Cyclades, where the author has spent much time, but this is no sequence of travel poems: rather the author fashions a rhapsodic celebration of place, bringing together—in one impressionistic whole—the light, the sea, buildings, birds and history—and Amorgos’s history goes back beyond Classical Greece, to the obscure period almost five thousand years ago, which saw the creation of the remarkable sculptures now known as Cycladic.