Foreign Music

The poems in LOVE TRAINING are intimate in focus and scale: taut and contemplative, they ruminate on family, exile, romantic love, and the vagaries of human perception.LOVE TRAINING, which gathers poems from several of Andres Neuman's books into a single unified collection, is divided into three sections. The first, the titular "Love Training," focuses on family (and its history), loss, relationships, love, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, "Fictions of Sight," are associated with questions of perception, perspective, and creativity. And the third, "I Don't Know Why" - which is the first phrase of every poem in the section - is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions; it serves as a kind of coda to the book. While Andres Neuman is a celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid, sensitive, incisive - and quite prolific - poet. LOVE TRAINING is the first English translation of his poetry.