Tributes

Carnival connections across the mysterious night air, a coup de foudre on a Jamaican beach, glorious summer sunsets, the crystalline streams of Iceland ("Patagonia of the North"), a blissful Saturday morning, a belly dancer on a Turkish island, and Manhattan preparing for sleep... these vignettes are matched by reflections on artists and film makers such as Matisse, Munch and Van Gogh, McCartney, Rohmer and Antonioni. The achievement of Tributes is the successful marriage of well-known artistic images - accessible to all, and thus objective - with the personal frame of the author's own mind, using as he does unexpected turns of phase that surely reflect his Latin American roots. Here is the whole gamut of the cityscape: urban hopes and dreams, fleeting encounters, sensual interludes, iconic glimpses of reality and art, and the continuing puzzle of history. Pithy, spare but never spiritless, these poems offer the supreme comfort of hope, and that is what makes them so enjoyable. Walter de las Casas was born in Havana, Cuba in 1947. He learned English there at Columbus School. As a teacher he taught a number of modern languages and bilingual subjects in New York City and its surrounding region.