“The quality of a poet can be determined, in part, by the writers who take the time to translate her or him. Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Strand, Gregory Rabassa, and many others have brought the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-87) to readers of English. Now Richard Zenith presents a generous selection of translations from Drummond's entire oeuvre, with the original Portuguese en face. Drummond was born in Itabira, a provincial town best known for its iron mines. After earning a pharmacology degree, he lived in cosmopolitan Rio, but his early life in the provinces left an indelible mark on his poetry. Prolific, briefly a Communist, he is the rare poet who can mention love, suffering, or both in almost every poem without sounding adolescent or false. The shortest poem in the book is 'Porcelain'-'The shards of life, glued together, form a strange teacup. // Unused, / it quietly observes us from the sideboard.' Drummond is a major poet. This volume is most welcome.” —Michael Autrey, Booklist

“Readers old enough to remember Travelling in the Family, a 1986 translation of some works by the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, will remember it fondly. It featured a lively selection of the poet's work, in translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Strand, Thomas Colchie, and Gregory Rabassa, and a fine, informative Introduction, and it served as the first exposure most English-language readers had to the strange, often dreamy brand of modernism Drummond's work embodies. Those readers will heartily welcome Multitudinous Heart, the generous new edition of Drummond's work from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and readers who missed Travelling in the Family will make the acquaintance of this poet. The new volume has a much broader selection from Drummond's six decades of published work; it's presented with facing-page Portuguese and an uncredited Introduction presumably by the volume's translator, Richard Zenith . . . The translations themselves are clear as glass. Short of learning the Portuguese, this new volume is the closest monoglot readers will yet be brought to Drummond's art.” —Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

“An expanded, reshuffled and welcome selection of Mr. Drummond's verse . . . In new translations by Richard Zenith, we meet a sophisticated and cerebral poet who, true to this book's title, speaks in many registers. He is by turns melancholy and ironic, sentimental and self-deprecating, remote and boyish. . . .Mr. Drummond is worth encountering on the page.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times