Victor Rodriguez Núñez is one of today’s most outstanding Cuban writers, although he has lived and worked elsewhere for nearly two decades, first in Nicaragua and Colombia and, since 1995, in the USA. The present collection, based on his selected poems With a Strange Scent of World: First Anthology, 1978-1998 (Havana, 2004), offers a representative sample, as well as a rewriting, of his early poetic work, full of vivid images from the poet’s youth and of both rural and urban Cuba.

In an interview, Núñez described his search for “a poetry that is… participatory yet not political… communicative yet not explicit… dialogic yet not conversational, Cuban yet not essentially nationalist…” and in her introduction to this volume, Katherine Hedeen provides us with background detail that helps to set the poet’s work in context. In Katherine Hedeen’s skilful translation, we discover poems that are at once committed and experimental, where every limit is challenged, and where emotion and lucidity come together.

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez has published eleven books of poetry, many of them recipients of literary awards, including the coveted David Prize (Cuba, 1980) and, most recently, the Leonor Poetry Prize (Spain 2006). His poems have appeared in literary journals throughout the world. He is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, Ohio. USA