A review by runawaykid
I'm Not Here to Give a Speech by Gabriel García Márquez

3.0

"I want to believe, my friends, that this is, once again a tribute paid to poetry. Poetry by whose virtue the prodigious inventory of ships enumerated by old Homer in his Iliad are visited by a wind that pushes them to sail with unearthly, dazzling speed. Poetry that sustains, in the slender scaffolding of Dante's tercets, the entire dense, colossal structure of the Middle Ages. Poetry that with such miraculous totality reaches our America in "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" by Pablo Neruda, the great, the greatest, and where our best dead-end dreams distill their millenarian sorrow. Poetry, in short, the secret energy of daily life that cooks garbanzos in the kitchen and spreads love like contagion and repeats images in mirrors. In every line I write I always try, with greater or lesser success, to invoke the elusive spirits of poetry and leave in each word a testimony to my devotion because of its powers of divination and its permanent victory over the muffled powers of death."

3.5 stars - a slim collection of speeches by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, mostly given during receipt of some literary prize, with lines that occasionally burst into poetry.