Songs of Mute Eagles -represents the second in an ongoing series of bilingual poetry collections published by Darklight Publishing LLC.
Arthur Gatti, the poet whose work fills this rich book of images, is a New Yorker in every sense of the word. Throughout his life, he has acquainted himself with characters and places-currents that make up the body of contemporary American counterculture and pop culture. And, like many American journalists and writers, he has traveled his country chasing ideas, jobs and romance, while accumulating images and priceless experiences that over the years he has turned into poems.
In this book there are tributes to the artistic currents from which the author was nourished - the "macho" poets Rudyard Kipling and Robert Service, Japanese haiku, Jack Kerouac and jazz music- as well as loving reflections on moments that move us just for being human.
Art Gatti's poems exude the city, losses and reunions, observations of the tiny and the grandiose, the mournful evocation of the extinct, and they have a smoldering predilection for iconoclastic chaos.
Gatti reflects several facets of the contemporary Renaissance man, writing poems with a devilish intent to engage the reader in their intricate verbal labyrinths, with complex analogies of double and triple meanings rising from the page like concentric clouds.
Here are a few lines of Art Gatti's poem Small Daily Ration of Sunlight
In darkness, all my familiar tones are a pallet/ inside a dark membrane/ that pulsates/ and tries to burst into some life force/ that is just a shadowy midmorning dream/ and can never be. And his poem, Red Song: The wail of some jazz man's horn/ reaches over the twilight/ weaving through brittle branches- dead apple trees of my blood's yearnings- to me/ in this cold and dying ember/ fireplace room where/ my face suddenly glows hotly/ thinking of you. DARKLIGHT PUBLISHING LLC, was established in New York City to disseminate the poetic work of American and Latin American authors through bilingual editions. Translation and editing is in the capable hands of teams of poets in Mexico and the United States.
The bilingual "Bridges" series was conceived by writers from both countries based on their knowledge of poetry as a genre, as well as an interest in their own language in relation to the other, and its books will include contemporary authors seeking readers that move through our geographic hemisphere in physical or virtual ways, and throughout our neighboring countries, where there is a broad exchange between the English and Spanish languages.
"Songs of Mute Eagles", bilingual edition, was translated into Spanish and edited by Arthur Gatti and Roberto Mendoza Ayala; it contains beautiful illustrations by Laurie Anderson, Antonio Carmelo Gatti, Michael Hartnett, Alethea Maguire-Cruz and Paul Oratofsky, and has a cover designed by the graphic artist Alonso Venegas Gómez based on an illustration by Alethea Maguire-Cruz.
About the Author: After studying poetics with poets Milton Kessler and Stephen Stepanchev, and carrying on correspondence with Robert Bly, Art Gatti graduated Queens College with a minor in poetry and a few honors, -notably the 1965 CUNY-(City University of New York)-wide Dwight Durling Award for a manuscript of poetry.
In the face of the Vietnam War, and in response to the growing need to resist racial injustice in the United States, he entered the world of 'sixties activism. He was a co-founder of Queens College SDS, collaborator with the late Mario Savio, of Free Speech Movement fame, and co-community-organizer in Newark, New Jersey, with the recently deceased Tom Hayden, of Chicago Eight fame. Working with Savio in 1963 and '64, he headed up a project in a barrio outside of Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, for the construction of a school in the area's poorest neighborhood.
In 2011, his efforts and material contributions helped establish at his old alma mater the northeastern United States' largest and most comprehensive archive of Civil Rights and community activism.
Political involvements eventually led him to journalism. He published hundreds of articles and columns and two books, wrote staged downtown comedy shows and sold a screenplay to the Hollywood powerhouse, New Line Cinema. As a result of the latter, he is a member-in-good-standing of the Producer-Writers Guild of America.
He's won various writing awards and has been published in The New Mexico Quarterly, America Sings, The East Village Other, PiF, The New York Hangover, And Then, Image9, Allegro, Riverside Library Poets Anthologies 2015 and 2016, Jefferson Market Library Poets Anthology 2017, The New York Times "Metropolitan Diary", and the international anthology From Neza York to New York-a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican poets that was honored by the Mexican government and celebrated at its NYC consulate in 2015 and '16.
He chaired a poetry/fiction workshop at WestBeth, Lower Manhattan's massive artists residency, and had a regular column, "Misadventures in Poetry," in WestView News. In 2015 he published a book of poetry with a half-century of poems he wrote about our sister nation, called Mexico-Dust in My Blood.
In 2016, he assisted in the English translation of In the Fire of Time, the poetry of the Mexican poet, María Ángeles Juárez Téllez.
