The Country of Planks/ El País de Tablas

Chilean poet Zurita (Dreams for Kurosawa) inhabits spaces—physical and psychic—ravaged by state violence in these severe, disorienting, and immensely powerful poems. He responds to the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, and to the thousands who disappeared during the regime: “the beaches of an infinitely/ bombarded country infinitely defeated infinitely dead.” A central concern is how the land—or rhetoric about the land—might absorb this history; Zurita creates an unsettling feedback loop linking geography, nation, and citizen. From the opening poem, in which “the sea stopped being the sea and the sky stopped being the sky// And the peaks were the points of the riveted stakes,” the landscape is repeatedly distorted, weaponized, reconfigured in the human image, and made to express the horrors in which it has been implicated. The poems look to other 20th-century atrocities as the poet ponders change and changelessness, totalizing horror and nothingness, and the excess of images of the inexpressible. In navigating these distances, Zurita asks, “Did the bombing last millions of years? A fraction/ of a second? Or just a few days? Who can say?/ Who can say how long the infernal lapse of a life/ lasts?” Bilingual edition. [em](May) [/em]