The University Record, September 24, 1997
By James Wilson
News and Information Services
The life and work of late Cuban poet Dulce Maria Loynaz and a probing essay by Jack David Eller are featured in the fall issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR).
Loynaz, a prominent poet in her youth, was ignored, her work all but forgotten for much of the last half-century. In the last few years, renewed interest in her work, both in Cuba and abroad, is demonstrated by new publication of her work and her winning the prestigious Cervantes prize in 1992, just five years before her death.
Included in the MQR issue is a biographical and critical essay, “Dulce Maria Loynaz: A Woman Who No Longer Exists,” by Ruth Behar, professor of anthropology, as well as a portfolio of new English translations of Loynaz’s poetry. Behar, Judith Kerman and David Frye translated Loynaz’s work, and several of Behar’s own poems are included in the issue.
In other works, Jack Eller, a professor of anthropology at Loretto Heights College in Denver, attempts to define “one of the most elastic of social concepts,” ethnicity. He explains the term’s often misunderstood and ever-expanding role in society. The essay, “Ethnicity, Culture and `The Past,'” is adapted from his book From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict: An Anthropological Perspective on International Ethnic Conflict, which will be published next year by the U-M Press.
In addition to Behar, the work of several other current and former U-M faculty members appears in this issue, including Edmund Creeth, Barbara Ryan and Peter Sparling.
Also appearing in the issue are fiction and poetry by Ivy Goodman, Sharon O’Dair, Richard Blanco, Catherine Staples, Edwin Honig and Gary Pacernick, and book reviews by Barbara Ryan and Wesley McNair.
The fall issue is available in local bookstores and in the MQR office, Room 3032, Rackham Building. For more information, consult the MQR Website at www.umich.edu/~mqr/ or call 764-9265.
