“Real seriousness,” Nicanor Parra, the Antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in “the comic.” And read in that light, this newest bilingual collection of his work––the first in twenty years––is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering of his signature mocking humor, subverting received conventions and pretensions in both poetry and everyday life, public and private, ingeniously and wittily rendered into English in an antitranslation (the word is Parra’s) by Liz Werner.…

Antipoems: New and Selected, a fresh bilingual gathering as well as retrospective of the work of Chile’s foremost poet, reintroduces him to North American readers after thirteen years. Though he has been hardly unproductive, the politics of his homeland have channeled his inventiveness into new modes of expression, which remind us of the sometimes sly hermeticism of Italian writers, Eugenio Montale and Elio Vittorini among them, during the Fascist regime. As Frank MacShane makes clear in his introduction, Parra has not tried to escape repression, but by “using his wit and his humor, he has shown how the artist can still speak the truth in troubled times.…

Emergency Poems is the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s second bilingual collection published by New Directions. The spare, often grim irony of the first Poems and Antipoems (1967)—a wide selection gleaned from his four earliest books—established his reputation with a North American reading public used to the more formal language of conventional Spanish-speaking poets. Since then he has traveled extensively in this country, teaching, lecturing, and reading from his own work; while in Chile he received the 1969 Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literature Prize) for his Obra Gruesa, from which many of the pieces in Emergency Poems are drawn.…