†L: Four Mapuche Poets

Another in the press's trilingual indigenous language series (see above), this volume samples four Mapuche poets from Chile, who contribute to the renewal of a culture more or less outlawed during the dark days of military role. An oral tradition, the ""agglutinating and polysynthetic"" songs in Mapandungun (the language of the Mapuche) influence the poets sampled here, only two of whom grew up speaking it. Like other indigenous poets, they fuse native verbal arts to modern concerns with the preservation of a land and a people, and their verse both witnesses and celebrates.