New Letters to a Young Poet

Margarit Joan

In these intimate pages, award-winning Catalan poet Joan Margarit offers a passionate defense of poetry and of the intelligible poem – the well-made text that can provide refuge, wisdom, and consolation. Inspired by Rilke's classic "Letters to a Young Poet", this slender volume explores poetry as vocation, obsession, and partnership between writer and reader, a "road toward inner growth". For Margarit, poetry promises "a clarity that allows us mysteriously to live without the need to forget". This is essential reading for poets young and old, writers, and readers seeking insights into the creative process and "the way both poet and reader can find their own way to face solitude".

About the Author

Joan Margarit is a Catalan poet and architect. He has won numerous awards for his previous books of poetry.

Christopher Maurer is professor of Spanish at Boston University.

Reviews

"In these letters, Joan Margarit, a major poet and architect writing in Catalan, dialogues with Rilke, thus updating for younger writers the many lessons learnt from life thanks to literature. It's a call for a poetry that tries to communicate exactly and concisely the experiences and emotions of everyday life. At the same time, this book is Margarit's compelling intellectual autobiography. Christopher Maurer's extensive experience as a translator of poetry is crucial in making this a noteworthy achievement" – Enric Bou, Brown University

"Joan Margarit, one of Catalonia's most acclaimed contemporary poets, believes poetry is a difficult art in an age of easy poesy. In 'New Letters to a Young Poet', Maragarit engages in a dialogue both with Rilke and with present-day readers in a passionate and rigorous definition of poetry as an art that entails knowledge, effort, architecture, love transcendence, and solitude. Perhaps inevitably it is also a manual for a certain way of living life. The epigraph, indeed, could be Rilke's 'And the point is to live everything'. And then to write it, with art" – Mary Ann Newman, The Catalan Center at New York University

"Poetry's allure still remains strong in the modern day. 'New Letters to a Young Poet' is a discussion of poetry and its role in today's literature. Stating that poetry can express more than just what the words read, Margarit gives readers a bit of memoir within the literary discussion. Translated from Spanish with an afterword by Christopher Maurer, 'New Letters to a Young Poet' is a choice and solidly recommended addition to community library literary collections" – Midwest Book Review

Back to the list of books