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Willis Barnstone is a literature in himself: poet, translator, interpreter, in one year he can range from Jesus to Sappho and Borges with calm authority and good humour. He re-translates the New Testament in a version Harold Bloom describes as ‘a superb act of restoration’. Borges himself declared, ‘Four of the best things in America are Whitman’s Leaves, Melville’s Whale, the sonnets of Barnstone’s The Secret Reader, and my daily Corn Flakes…’ Mexico in My Heart is the essential Barnstone, drawing on fifteen collections, poetry from six decades of writing and from several continents. He went to Mexico at the age of fifteen and, gathering languages and literatures, has never stopped learning.
