I admit a thrill of anticipation with this publication. As a Guyanese writer living in Wales, I find a sense of comfort in the historical and cultural links between 'my' continent and Wales. Latin America has always represented a mysterious and 'other' world to me: were it not for the accidents of history from 1492 onwards, I may well have been within the classification of the 'Spanish Americas' - a  classification which Richard Gwyn does not use '...for the fact that many poets would feel that this tied them too closely to their colonial pasts'.
        Think Latin America and we imagine coups and communion, Sandinistas, cocaine crops, Peron, the disappeared. But this collection offers us much more; it's a vital chronicle of contemporary voices. From historical and ongoing tribulation there is a powerful echo of human resistance, which blossoms through into a celebration of resilience. While many of these poems are shot through with powerful evocations of suffering, such as the most disturbing 'list poem' I have ever read, The Dead, by Mexican poet Maria Rivera:

Here they come
the decapitated,
the amputees.
the torn into pieces

They are equally creatively constructed, ironic, wry and playful, such as this from Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre's 'Infomercial':

Lady Macbeth Stain Remover offers you
an incredible solution that will revolutionize
        domestic hygiene

and full of surprise and pathos:

... whenever I begin to talk
and reminisce about shags with Velasquez. . .
Now it's more normal for me to go into a
church ... because I like the light that certain
candles cast ... on my tits

'The Tyrantess', Diego Maquiera, Chile.

        This is a rich, multi-layered collection of poetry in translation, from countries bonded by history and a language that is not indigenous. Translation summoned challenges - not only of meaning, but intent and mood. Selection was based on poems written after 1945, by still living writers; this gave Gwyn the opportunity to discuss some poems in depth with the poets, a process which would by nature have become a conversation, and add to the translations. The preface is an admirable asset to the reader, as is the grouping of poems into six sections, simply titled from 'Where we live', to 'What becomes of us'.
        Although I'm a non-Spanish reader, I loved the placement of the originals on facing pages, a constant reminder of the poet's presence.
        One of Gwyn's aims was 'to make available poetry that spoke to contemporary readers' and these poems unquestionably do that. In Alejandro Crotto's poem 'Pigeons', after hunting, two young boys are:

... forcing the fingers up to
where the sternum ends, twisting them
inside the still-warm body, grasping and
     pulling down,
we rip out the large intestine and belly, yank
     out the lungs
like a pink sponge sticking to the ribs,
kidneys, liver, stilled heart

        Their activity is a striking metaphor for our journey through the poems, mimicking the intimacy, almost invasion, into heart and mind, a textural exposure to the wide range of subject matter from love to violence, both historic and everyday.
        The reality of people living in fear is powerfully exposed in Andres Neuman's poem 'Buenos Aires on the Fly', sited among memories of named places and lost people

... the brown/ pestilence of the river, ashamed
       of it's history
and of sinister helicopter flights,
the terror, blows...

while in 'Panorama', Chilean poet Jamie Pinos writes of the city as a construct in a continent prone to natural disaster

...culture is savage/and is built with equal
     parts of sap and blood.
The habitat
a big little rubbish tip of peripheral modernity
at the foot of the Andes
beneath the immense sky of America.
....places and things/barely offer any
      resistance...
a phantom town/lodged in a river of oblivion

        In Clemente Riedemann's powerful poem, 'The man from Leipzig', the past and the present are permanently connected by location, his great-grandfather 'carried the whole sea in his cheeks', their stories on migrating 'belong somewhere else', not this time-tunnel where

...only fog, a maize napkin to wrap up the old
     wooden ships: the Steinward, the
Hermann, the Brigantine, Suzanne, and the 
Alfred. All in search of paradise. For all of them
disappointment and forest.

Like so many migrants,

My father's father's father had to speak in
another language, to squeeze out, once more,
the semen of daybreak.

This poem exemplifies for me the purpose of an anthology like this, where poets see themselves as carrying an ancestral baton. Like Seamus Heaney in his poem 'Digging',* Reidemann brings to life

The man of leipzig, the carpenter, brought
      me to earth in the pencil behind his ear,
from which I have come down to organise
the world with words.

This brief review does not do justice to the many layers within this book. Buy it and prepare to travel.

*Seamus Heaney's famous poem 'Digging' links the use of his pen with that of his father's spade. My poem 'Warrior', uses a similar analogy through my Madeiran grandmother.