Of Death. Minimal Odes

Hilda Hilst

If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst's Of Death. Minimal Odes is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration--the corporeal flesh fusing with death's own dark corpus. With a visceral-mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst's odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst's significant body of poetry to appear in English, Laura Cescarco Eglin renders the imagery and philosophical complexity of these minimal odes with brio, while preserving the playful tone and lush melodies that mark Of Death. Minimal Odes as uniquely Hilstian.

'Before gaining notoriety for her highly original, experimental, and provocative works of fiction, Hilda Hilst engraved her name in Brazilian literary circles as a poet. Of Death. Minimal Odes, newly and assuredly translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin, shows Hilst the poet at her distilled best. As much a multimedia conversation with poetry as with life, death, and herself, Hilst poses essential questions whose answers lie at the core of these poems.' – John Keene