Poemas Militantes

by Raúl Zurita

The two threads of this book are militancy (civic, political, social) and love (the beloved, the people). There are threads that alternate with each other, but the more intriguing moments are intertwined and this fabric of love and activism is the greatest merit of the book. One of their highest poetic achievements are in describing the ruins present and the future of all humankind - from the Parthenon to the Eiffel Tower, by contrast "Yet we have erected monuments / / two gazes that cross, for example, / my love for you, for example, that precedes me / thousands of thousands of years / and I will survive until the last of the / men contemplating / the last of the sunset." It is not purely a militant poem, but a love poem, or the ultimate poem.

Unknown Binding

First published February 24, 2014

About the author

Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago de Chile. In 1973 he was arrested by the Pinochet regime and imprisoned in the hold of a ship. He was a founder of the group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), which undertook extremely risky public-art actions against the regime. In 1982 five airplanes wrote his poem “La Vida Nueva” in the sky above New York City, and in 1993 he had the phrase “NEITHER PAIN NOR FEAR” bulldozed into the Atacama Desert in a permanent, two-mile-long installation, visible only from above. Zurita received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000 and the Asan Memorial World Poetry Prize in 2018.

Reviews

[Pepe Llopis Manchón · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una indudable fuerza recorre cada poema de Zurita.
He de reconocer que es lo mejor que he leído del autor.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Self declared as wanting to take Chilean poetry away from the ghost of Neruda, Raul Zurita's Poemas Miletantes is a plain spoken, ultimately forgettable short collection of cantos. Mariels Griffor does a good job with these translations, but there's little intensity in the imagery or the language to keep me compelled.