I am no great connoisseur of music, for I lack a musical ear. But even so I can appreciate a little the beauty of Yolanda Blanco’s work–and I am pleased she has set two epigrams of mine to music. It seems to me this is a way to spread poetry more widely.
Ernesto Cardenal
(Catholic priest and one of the world’s best-known contemporary poets.)  		 

 Yolanda, how much my heart stirred to hear you sing Nonantzin. I've listened -- with immense nostalgia, and with pleasure.
Dore Ashton
(US art critic. She is a professor and director at Cooper Union Art School in New York.)		  

 Nonantzin will bring to you the spirit of Nicaragua as Enya brought to World Music the spirit of Ireland. Yolanda Blanco has blended great poetry of her land with melodies reflecting great emotion. In merging tradition with modern technology, a wonderful atmosphere has been thus created for all.
Anthony Bartoli
(Hall of Mirrors Music)		  

 Here is poetry and music to help heal the deep wounds of old trauma as well as the cuts and scratches of our daily lives.
Steven F. White
(He translated Poet in New York, by Federico García Lorca, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)		  

 Journeying back to the past of poetry, Yolanda Blanco finds music and succeeds in reuniting both art forms in this collection. The melodies and arrangements make the words of her motherland's poets move our soul the natural way rain and water make music together.
Gioconda Belli
(Together with Ernesto Cardenal, Belli is the Nicaraguan poet best known internationally.)		  

 

 A Nation Tempered by Poetry
Nicaraguans, hardened by a history of invasions, brutal dictatorships and natural disasters, turn to poets for healing and guidance. They are the country's heroes.

"Nicaragua needs a lot of healing, and through its best product, poetry, it can be healed," contemporary Nicaraguan poet Yolanda Blanco said by telephone from her New York City home. "Great poets are like teachers--they are listened to in Nicaragua."

Blanco's hope is that poetry can help Nicaraguans find a way from a violent past to a peaceful future. This fall, she will release "Nonantzin," or "Beloved," a collection of verse by well-known Nicaraguan writers of different political stripes, which she has set to music.
"Today's Nicaragua wants to purge itself of the 1980s," Blanco said. "The poetical-musical anthology I offer is a little song to give a good birth to a new people, a people who deserve a better fate."

She chose poems by Cuadra, who was exiled by the Sandinistas, and by two prominent Sandinistas, Cardenal and the late Urtecho. She said politics weren't a consideration in her selection.

"They are poems looking for a guitar," she said. "I want this to be a balm for wounds, a way to say, 'Listen, follow your poets; there is wisdom in their words.' "

Juanita Darling
Los Angeles Times

  

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 © 2000 Yolanda Blanco