The Dark Room and Other Poems

Lihn is a difficult poet because his sources lie in various traditions of modern Chilean poetry, especially Neruda and Parra, while he rejects traditionalism. He is in the line of neorealism and antipoetry, but is unwilling to settle into schools or a school. His Poesia de Paso received the Cuban Casa de las Americas Prize in 1966. He says of his own work, "my poetry postulates, instead of discontinuity, the coherence [delirious, in the best of cases] of a continuous discourse, it tries to become a reflection, it rambles; and although it may integrate linguistic elements of the most diverse origins, signs of a traumatic relation with Literature prevail." Jonathan Cohen is the editor and compiler of William Carlos Williams' By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish,1916-1959 and editor and translator of Ernesto Cardenal's Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems, both published recently by New Directions. John Felstiner is the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. He teaches at Stanford University.