Apparent Breviary

Gastón Fernández

Gastón Fernández’s hermetic collection of 100 psalm-like poems marks the English-language debut of this legendary Peruvian writer of the late twentieth century. Fernández lived most of his adult life in Belgium, working as an art historian. While publishing his scholarship mostly in French, he produced literary works semi-secretly in his native Spanish. Shared only with close friends, very few of these works were published in his lifetime. Apparent Breviary is his lone collection of poems, notable as much for their silences as what they say, their use of negative space as a counterweight to speech, and the hallucinatory effect of their sequence.