“A vivid, evocative account of family, place and memory, through Homeric poetry and myth, beautifully translated by Robin Myers.”

“Family, spiritual discovery, the recovery of myth and what it means when we use words like ‘sacred’, or ‘soul’ - Daniel Lipara explores all the larger questions with grace, compassion and deft humour in this gem of a collection. Inventively and scrupulously translated by Robin Myers, Another Life is one of the finest books of poetry that I have read in some time. ”

“It is hard to describe all that Another Life is—epic poem, bildungsroman, family chronicle, elegy. The thing is, though, description doesn’t matter—the poem beguiles and charms, moves as muscular as an epiphany through the silence it meditates on halfway through when the speaker comes of age at an ashram with his mother. It is dappled with dazzling Homeric similes, describing the life of an Argentine boy descended from Greek farmers and Russian seers as he witnesses, say, his mother being wrapped into a sari in rural India, or his father disassemble an engine in Mataderos. It is home to an effortless abundance, but never a clutteredness, thanks in large part to Robin Myers exceptional translation. In her hands, the lines are as lucent and bracing as ice cubes dropped in a glass of water—lava halts, gusts of smoke bluster—and the syntax is as fluid and free of punctuation as the Aeolian winds that move Lipara’s people across oceans and eras and into as much as out of each other’s lives. Unaffected yet profound, casual but alert to the innate dignity of life, the poem that Robin Myers has brought us does what great poems do: show us the ancient in the contemporary, the lightness in the gravity, the gleaming thread of the sacred woven everywhere in the commonplace. ”

“Memorable books are almost always many books in one. They gather traditions, procedures, techniques, and genres that would have seemed both anachronistic and incompatible if they hadn’t been gathered precisely so. In retrospect, they evoke a curious sense of inevitability. Another Life, the debut of poet and translator Daniel Lipara, is one such book.

In an immediate sense, it is a young man’s story of a trip to India—to Sai Baba’s ashram in Puttaparthi—in hopes of finding a cure for his mother’s cancer. More than that, it recounts a journey into childhood—but free of nostalgia. It is maybe because childhood tends to be experienced as a continuous present (the verb tense that predominates in Another Life). As a result, this book may also be read as an initiation into a craft and a faith. Pure present is the time of the sacred, a constant preoccupation in this book—and it’s the time of poetry itself.”