The Song Less/on

a book of poetry by Alvaro Cardona-Hine

–Tom McGrath in The National Guardian 


reviewing the haiku in The Gathering Wave.

“Cardona-Hine is far more tuned to silence than Eliot; there are no phases to his theology. He offers no disciplines, nor even Zen vacancies; he offers arrivals . . . This gentle poet has little to do with the hysterical attenuated surrealism which has in recent years dominated the better little magazines. Or with archetypes of the Great Mother or other theorizing . . . It is understandable that poets want to move out into the universe, to dream of being moles, to sink into mineral veins, to make wild dissociated images that dissolve the self. But Cardona-Hine preserves the sense of human self-hood, human wonder, adventure.”

–Benjamin Saltzman in Kayak 
reviewing Words On Paper.

Alvaro Cardona-Hine was born in Costa Rica in 1926 and was brought to the United States by his parents in 1939. By 1945 he was writing poetry then went on to translate Cesar Vallejo, write novels, make a living as a painter, and compose music which has been performed in various parts of the country. He is the recipient of an NEA grant, a Bush Foundation Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. He lives with his wife, the poet and painter Barbara McCauley, in the small village of Truchas, in New Mexico, where the two manage their own gallery.