Dark Room and Other Poems

The Introduction to this selection invokes the names of Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra - and to their ranks adds fellow Chilean Enrique Lihn. We've got two words to say about that: Shame. Shame. Since there is bilingual text here, one's first apprehension is shunted toward the amateurish translations ("We stopped rolling around, overcome by a strange feeling of/shame, without managing to come up with another reproach/than the one for finding such an easy victim") but further persual yields evidence that it's Lihn himself who's that dreadful. Banal quasi-philosophy ("we have all the time in the time ahead/to become the emptiness that we are deep down inside"), sense infelicities ("We all live in darkness, kept apart from each other/ by walls easily crossed but full of false doors"), bludgeon-politics ("No doubt about it;/of the sixty thousand FBI and CIA agents, only a few/ have shown their true faces"). Admittedly, Chile, for certain sectors of the literary scene, is now what Vietnam used to be - a sentimental Eden of bloodied but unbowed genius - but surely we could have found someone better, less insufferable, than Lihn. "I wrote, was a poor kind/of beggar boggled with pride,/and also put a few readers to death. . . ." Too true. (Kirkus Reviews)