"The Book of Giulio Camillo is a sequence of haunting incantatory poems by Carlota Caulfield, beautifully translated by Mary G. Berg. Writing about loss and memory and the redemption that comes of confronting the wound, Caulfield summons up the inner life in the dream music of theinexpressible."
—Chana Bloch, author of The Past Keeps Changing
In Classical times, Memory (Mnemosyne) was fabled to be the mother of the Muses. Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory traces the Platonic sources of Giulio Camillo's 16th-century Theater of Memory in which "memory is not...one part of the art of rhetoric; memory...is the groundwork of the whole." In these haunting, enigmatic, impeccably modern poems--the Seven Pillars not of Wisdom but of Memory--Memory functions as the key to Carlota Caulfield's complex subjectivity. These three-lined, haiku-like poems resemble the frames of a film we do not quite remember but cannot forget. They usher us into a primal world in which "THE MIND'S TRACE / is defined in seeds filled with water;" in which
Carlota Caulfield (La Habana, Cuba) poeta, ensayista, crítico literario y traductora. Licenciada en Historia en la Universidad de La Habana, un M.A. en Literatura española en San Francisco State University, y un Doctorado en Filosofía y Letras en Tulane University. Nacida en cuba, Carlota ha residido en diferentes partes del mundo como Dublín, Zürich, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Oakland, y Londres. Desde el año 1992 ha establecido su residencia de forma casi permanente en Berkeley. Entre 1998 y 2002, Caulfield dirigió la revista ...