WINNER OF THE 2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of poems written in and for the new century. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, migrant workers, Mexico’s oppressed, female saints, other writers (such as Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia), and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imaginary landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes: “a poem is like a door / we’ve never passed through...” And now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. “Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,” he writes, “I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same.”

Homero Aridjis' profile page

Born in 1939 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, George McWhirter grew up on the Shankill Road. He attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where his classmates included Seamus Heaney, and later completed a Masters degree at the University of British Columbia. McWhirter lived in Spain from 1965 to 1966, when he moved to Canada where he taught high school in Port Alberni, making an abrupt transition from Barcelona to living in a log cabin by Sproat Lake. He is the author of twenty books, many of which have won major awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the MacMillan Prize for Poetry, the Canadian Chapbook Poetry Competition Winner, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the FR Scott Prize for Translation. In 2005, George McWhirter retired as a professor in the Creative Writing Department at UBC. In 2007 he was inaugurated as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.

George McWhirter's profile page

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, which includes selections from Aridjis’s four most recent collections, along with previously unpublished poetry, is a significant addition to an already important body of work.... The collection’s title poem will likely endure as one of the great gems that the now 82-year-old Aridjis produced in his late period. It’s simultaneously philosophical and surreal but nonetheless retains an intense sensuality and presence of being that anchors it in earthly realities.

André Naffis-Sahely

Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door into the light.

Seamus Heaney

Aridjis’ work casts a beguiling spell that blurs the line between dreaming and waking.

Chard deNiord

In his vast oeuvre, Aridjis has produced many works that confront apocalyptic times.

Carlos Fonseca

Aridjis is a poet of great vitality and originality.

W. S. Merwin

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence brings poet-translator George McWhirter’s adept English to the service of a great world-poet, Homero Aridjis. The book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding. A keynote is the sense of a person speaking with us plainly and yet from kinship with a light that bathes, and springs from, each thing.

judges’ citation, 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize

A great flame passes through the words, the poetry, of Homero Aridjis, who sets reality alight in images that at once illuminate and consume it, making life a sister of dream. Homero is a great poet; our century has great need of him.

Yves Bonnefoy