Emergency Poems

Poetry by Nicanor Parra

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. In his introduction to this latest collection, Miller Williams, the translator, comments that Parra’s “poetry has moved and expanded as the imagination behind it has since the publication of Poems and Antipoems. Those who are familiar with Parra’s work will find the humor more sharply honed and darker, the anger closer to the surface and sometimes breaking through, the language tighter, the compassion deeper and the statements more political—or anyway more social.”

Paperback(published Apr, 01 1972)

ISBN
9780811201346

Clothbound(published Apr, 01 1972)

ISBN
9780811203401
Portrait of Nicanor Parra

Nicanor Parra

20th Century Chilean Poet