Cuba in the Blood by Wendy Klein
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Cuba in the Blood is the long awaited first collection from US poet and long-term British resident, Wendy Klein. Travelling from the Cuba of her grandfather to modern Cuba in honed, lyrical poetry and moving from childhood to motherhood and beyond, all the while protesting the race with time, this is an accomplished and deeply satisfying collection. Accessible and humane; observed with the story-tellers keenness and warmth, this is poetry to go back to again and again.
Praise for Klein’s poetry
Several continents run richly in Wendy Klein’s blood, and with her strongly cinematic imagination and energetic, delicate musicality she maps and sings them powerfully for us. The poems in ‘Cuba in the Blood’ combine not only her own intensely-felt personal history but equally the greater narrative of the world at large during the 20th century—a moving and fascinating fusion.
Jane Draycott
Richly textured, full of life, energy and feeling.
Susan Utting
Wendy Klein’s journeys… vibrate with a sense of the local, the vivid, the tangible, the olfactory, her poet’s eye constantly weighing the value of intimate detail against the cold sweep of history.
Anne-Marie Fyfe
These intense and finely-managed poems memorably ponder the tugs of the past on collision course with a restless hunger to explore. Klein’s keen and distinctive rhythmic control (the ‘twitch and tingle’ of a beat, as she has it) itself renders shifting and subtly changing perceptions and self-exploration. … restraint and technical finesse, gives her poems (unflinching and by turns, hilarious, raw, tender) the power to reverberate in the mind long after a first or second reading.
Peter Carpenter
Wendy Klein’s poetry has appeared in anthologies and poetry magazines. A retired family psychotherapist, she is a regular reader at the Troubadour and Poets’ Cafe in Reading. She enjoys belly-dancing and the curative company of dogs.