IT’S entirely fitting that The Scent of Buenos Aires (Archipelago Books, £18), the first collection of short stories by Argentinian writer Hebe Uhart to be translated into English, has the reproduction of a painting by Xul Solar on its cover.

The Argentinian visual artist was not only a great painter, sculptor and writer but an inventor of imaginary languages and it is possible to deduce that from Uhart’s well-crafted short stories with their strange narratives exploring the oddities and mysteries of daily life with a new and simple language.

Always revealing, these witty and sometimes cryptic tales are mostly set in Buenos Aires by a writer’s writer who has an acute eye for the uncanny and the mundane.

One of my favourites in the collection is Paso del Rey, set in a small town some 35 kilometres west of Buenos Aires, very much like the one where Uhart was born in 1936.

Not much seems to happen in the house of elderly aunt Elisa, where family members come to visit. Yet the anecdotes of the story’s simply drawn but colourful characters reveal a way of life that is inherently Rioplatense.

Uhart, who published numerous books and died in 2018 a year after receiving the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award, is one of the most singular and exiting female voices of recent decades in Latin America.

Her unique body of work and her unforgettable voice lives on in many of today’s younger generation of writers emerging on the continent.

My attention was first drawn to the work of Alfonso Reyes through the writings of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who acknowledged the Mexican as the “best prose stylist in the Spanish language of any age.”

Miracle of Mexico (Shearsman Books, £14.95), a selection of his poems translated by Timothy Ades, reveals his ability to express ideas through an imagery widely recognised as the essential element of his style.

Born in Monterrey in 1889, Reyes symbolises the humanist par excellence. He had an immense intellectual curiosity and vast culture, reflected in the variety of subjects and topics he chose for his poems, from an ode to the death of Leon Tolstoy and a collection on classical Greek myths to songs and sonnets to his beloved Mexico and Spain.

In this major bilingual collection of his poetry, the first to appear in English in Britain, Ades impressively translates each poem following Reyes’s strict rhyming scheme.

It’s a delightful read for those interested in discovering a wise and penetrating poet of delicate sensibilities, one educated in the school of Gongora and Mallarme, whose poetry is still very much relevant today.

After Ruben (Red Hen Press, £13), a stunning collection of poems by Latinx poet Francisco Aragon, is inspired by Ruben Dario, one of Latin America’s greatest poets and thinkers.

There is great tenderness in Aragon’s poetry, which in this book explores a wide range of subjects. They range from subtle portraits of his late father to evocations of his native San Francisco, the state of the US under Bush and Trump, racism against Latinos in the US or the colours and flavours of the Nicaragua of his parents.

The latter is there in his poem Nicaragua in a Voice: “More than the poems/ — the fruits that sang/their juices; dolls, feverish,/dreaming of nights,/city streets — for me it was/the idle chat between the poems:/cordial, intimate almost…/like a river’s murmur/as if a place — Leon,/Granada — could speak,/whistle, inhabit/a timbre… as if, closing/my eyes, I had it again,/once more within reach:/his voice — my father/unwell, won’t speak.”

Ecuadorean poet and writer Agustin Guambo directs the anarcho editorial project Murcielagario Kartonera in Quito and his chapbook, Andean Nuclear Spring (Ugly Duckling Presse, £6) incorporates Spanish, indigenous and Latino languages.

As fierce as it is refreshingly anarchic, this little book packs a punch, as in the poem To the Minor Poet that I Am:

“…We got divided/one was the poet and the other the dead man who carried the/poet/ We aged, yes we aged/like stars that no one ever saw, much less named/And we began to die…

“But we were still drunk and on drugs/on drugs and drunk/and still we didn’t give a fuck about the world.”