Breaking new ground has been for Octavio Paz a serious preoccupation. The Orient provided him with new style and concepts. The haiku drew him naturally, and so did the renga. A few years ago he took up the Japanese poetic tradition of composing a poem simultaneously with three major European poets. In this first renga ever to appear in the West, each of these poets wrote successively short, unrhymed, syllabically controlled stanzas in four different languages. Air Born/Hijos del aire is yet another experiment that the Mexican poet undertook with Charles Tomlinson when they decided to make a "postal meditation in sonnet form" writing alternatively the two quartets and the two tercets in their native Spanish and English with translation from the one into the other….

There are altogether eight sonnets, six of which were written together and two separately by each poet on two themes, "House...