hispanic spleen ( )

Poetry that might champion my shadow in days to come

when I’ll be just a name not the man who wandered

with empty pockets, worked in slaughterhouses

on the old and on the new continent.

I seek credibility not durability for the ballads

I composed in honor of very real girls.

After Novel Explosives I needed something to clear the air of cordite. These Beat-ish ruminations certainly cleansed, if only with the tears elicited. Heartfelt and sprawling, the verses ache of exile and loneliness. There are themed clusters of redheads and hunchbacks, crooked cops and faded postcards. I was expecting more books and reading to be chronicled. Despite my surprise this is a worthy testament. ( )

At the moment I can safely say I prefer The Savage Detectives, which is the only book of his I've read so far. Although many of the poems are funny, frank, bawdy, and capacious in the manner of his prose in TSD, the poems don't grab me. Or I don't get them. There's no pull, no push, just tedium. I'm really not sure why but it feels like an effort to read at this point in time.

No debemos leer la prosa de Bolaño, o la poesía de Bolaño, como dos cuerpos separados, o dos fenómenos; no debemos leer las dos vidas de Bolaño como paralelas imposibles; no debemos leer las huellas de Bolaño, aquí y allá, en unas y en otras, como marcas de una biografía involuntaria imposible; no debemos leer a Bolaño como un proyecto trunco, seguido de otro proyecto truncado, estancos. Yo creo que disfrutaremos leyendo si buscamos la presencia, la reverberación de algo otro y de un mismo, alguien que respire por los instersticios de lo escrito, que busque esconderse tanto como se revela y escapa de un sentido a otro sentido, de una lectura a otra lectura a través de los poros de la obra escrita, verso o prosa, como una exhalación, un aliento sensible. La inteligibilidad de la una es inseparable de la otra, no como presas de la interpretación analítica o sintética, sino como potencial generador informe, en tensión y lucha con la Forma. ( )

Bolaño saw himself as a poet first and foremost, and his poetry feeds his prose beautifully, but as this collection shows he was far more accomplished as a prose writer. ( )