On April 23rd, Antares will be adding and presenting three original books to its catalogue to commemorate International Book Day (check info). Here is a review of The Sun Never Sets by Erik Martinez.
Erik Martínez is one of Canada’s most original poets. Born in Chile and exiled after the coup d’état against Salvador Allende, he was a member of the avant-garde “Escuela de Santiago” poets, most of whom settled in Ontario. The eerie, oneiric quality of his bilingual book of poems, Tequila Sunrise, translated by Christina Schantz and published by Ediciones Cordillera in 1985, made it an immediate classic in Hispanic Canadian writing, and he has since read at many venues and published in a number of anthologies.
A professional translator, Martínez has now chosen to write The Sun Never Sets in English, bringing a tone of curious, phlegmatic detachment to scenes of a haunting world of imaginary interiors and bursts of surreal events. These marvellously inventive poems play with claustrophobia and transcendence, utopian desires and lugubrious alienation, with echoes of Beckett and Brecht and images of Hopper and Ernst. The inner world writhes and transforms through myriad shapes as the mind searches its way out of a soulless and crumbling civilization, splitting the clouds of the soundless sky so that wild matter will rule again.
Hugh Hazelton
Posted on April 21, 2026
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