Kirmen Uribe has become one of the best-known Basque-language writers--an important contemporary voice from a vital but largely unknown language. Meanwhile Take My Hand presents Uribe's poetry to American readers in both the original and in the poet Elizabeth Macklin's skillful and award-winning translations.
In these poems are the drug addicts of Spanish fishing towns, the paved-over rivers of urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with a companionable silence. The Basque phrase Bitartean heldu eskutik, which became the book's title--Meanwhile Take My Hand--Uribe has said is "what you say when there's nothing at all you can say."
