The Encantadas

What began as a sequence of poems about the Galapagos Islands (The Enchanted Isles), and a riff on the imagery of Herman Melville, who wrote the original Encantadas, has become the work of twenty-five years for Robert Allen. Originally serialized over four books of poetry, this long poem is here published in its entirety. The Encantadas is a rich and engaging meditation on the themes all poets come to face: love, death, time, and self; and maybe most importantly, the power of stories to make the world for us.