LOCAL>> Doreen Stock and Marcelo Holot – A Noise in the Garden & Your Excellency Free Will

A Noise in the Garden was published by Kelsay Books in February 2022. In this generous selection from privately printed chapbooks of recent years the mature poet is revealed in her various voices: spiritual seeker, religious sage, daughter, mother, grandmother, great- grandmother, traveler, lover, political critic, compassionate protester, student of current affairs, world questioner.

Her tone ranges from wonder and awe to grief and disbelief, her acute sensitivity and active consciousness constantly engaged in earthy yet transcendent realms of perception. The pleasures of sensory awareness and the joys of human interconnection permeate even the most tragic of Stock’s insights.

An aura of mystery suffuses every sentence. The depth of experience rendered here defies description except in its own words recording an ever-elusive understanding. Alternately lyrical, prosaic, magical, dreamlike and experimental, these writings are the rich harvest of a constantly inquiring, intelligent and restless heart. — Stephen Kessler, Poet and literary translator, author of Moving Targets: On Poets, Poetry & Translation

Doreen Stock, poet, essayist, memoir artist and literary translator lives in Fairfax, CA. Other publications include: In Place Of Me, Poems Selected and with an Introduction by Jack Hirschman, Mine Gallery Editions, June, 2015; Three Tales from the Archives of Love, a work of historical fiction published by Norfolk Press, January, 2018, Tango Man, a collection of love poems published by Finishing Line Press 2020, and Bye Bye Blackbird, poems touching her mother’s last days, published in 2021 by The Poetry Box. A selection of her poems and translations and an interview have been archived @ Marin Poet’s, Live!

When I first encountered the thin columns of poems predominating Amparo Casasbellas Alconada’s Excelentisimo Albedrio I had just met with her in the law offices she then shared with Gustavo Soler and was sitting a few blocks away at Petit Colon Café, situated in the heart of Buenos Aires between the grand Teatro Colon and the infamous Palacio de Tribunales.

Through the café’s wide glass windows, I could see porteños streaming past me. And, indeed, this window full of ordinary citizens is exactly where the first poem begins with its elegant consideration of the true nature of “the other” referential to the self.

The “First Canto” announces a poetry at once introspective and philosophical dressed in a post-modern grammar, and this annunciation containing the words “pain” and “humanity” evokes the collection’s profound concerns.

Written over a period of ten years these poems range widely as young Amparo moves from her grief at the death of her father, the Argentine journalist and cultural force Ramiro Casasbellas, out into a world written both large and small.

Because from her earliest years she was exposed to her father’s library, such literary greats as Pablo Neruda (whose funeral her father attended clandestinely), Octavio Paz, Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, Oliverio Girondo, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, and Rubén Darío, Casabellas-Alconada was deeply grounded in her literary tradition before she even picked up the pen to write these poems.

Marcelo Holot, born 1945 in Buenos Aires, is a journalist, investigative historian, WWII specialist, and has for years conducted guest radio and TV programs on current affairs and general information. He was a collaborator at Radio Universidad de La Plata, the oldest University Radio in the world, at Universidad El Aire, and at For They Themselves, with Óscar Ochoa de la Mazza. He has interviewed five Nobel Laureates, Argentine and Foreign Presidents, National and Foreign Ministers, writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Jaques Cousteau, medical greats Prof Dr René Favaloro and Cristian Barnard, sports greats Guillermo Vilas and Diego Armando Maradona, as well as Ted Kennedy, Juan Manuel Fangio, Jimmy Carter, and the astronaut Franklin Change Diaz. As a hobby he enjoys abstract painting.