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*André Breton. Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares. Trans. Edouard Rodito. No pagination.

This was a pretty fundamental book for me. I've owned it since at least the middle 1970s. Those blue pages! The designs by Arshile Gorky! I had serious case of ear-worm with the phrase "Jersey-Guernsey in sombre and illustrious weather," at about the same time that the beginning of Pound's "Seafarer" got stuck in my head for several months.

Breton's poems are not very good here, except for the wonderful "Union Libre," a surrealist blason. I easily accepted the notion that Neruda and Aleixandre were much better poets than the French surrealists.

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*Concha García. Desdén. 1990. 95 pp.

García's Disdain is written in short, almost fragmentary poems, often with repeated titles, and express an obsessive consciousness of erotic ennui. The subject is the tedium of sex.