This is a collection of forty-odd love poems whose chosen emblem is a dog, man’s best friend but a lowly animal still. Politics and regimes, its cloak, are inescapable from the experience of poetry because the experience is a Latin American one. But at the same time, the tone strives for freedom from the ideological banality of history because the experience is also universal and, in the light of the poet’s path-breaking prose, bridges the global post-national territory.

The poems are about ceaseless and aimless wanderings, encounters with friends and lovers, casual sex, poverty, isolation, and dialogues with established poets. The idealism and innocence of youth are being tested.

It is notable that the poet’s efforts of a conscious artistry, for such a highbrow subject as poetry and a dangerous calling as living on the edge of poetry, is peopled with individuals coming from low standing (prostitutes, vagrants, homosexuals, emigrants, and exiles), lowlifes who in their pathetic fates and decadence are pictured sympathetically in poetry even as they also took centerstage in the novels. Clearly the inner workings of Bolañoland are metaphorical identifications with the oppressed and their progress in this hostile civilization.

The backdrop of the poet’s romances is the dark undercurrents of history (Nazism, dictatorship, torture, kidnapping), which is often likened to a horror movie. The escape is through sexual trysts but the comfort they bring is ephemeral, sometimes artificial, and oftentimes do not really bring comfort at all.

My full review here: http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2009/06/... ( )

Romantic dogs is the first appearance in English translation of the late Roberto Bolano's poetry. In the last couple years the publishing of his two major novels The Savage Dectectives andd 2666 have been media events nonetheless Bolano seems to have considered himself a poet first and foremost.

Translating from one language to another especially in poetry can be a tricky thing. The text being in both languages I would rather leave Laura Healy's translation abilities to someone more expert in the Spanish language. In any case there are no clinkers. Going in one might have expected Bolano's work would depend much on the lucid insights his novels are known for and that turned out to be pretty much the case. He is not Nicanor Parra though--so he is not even the best Chilean poet but there is nothing to be ashamed of there as nobody is--Parra IMO is just simply the best and as a matter of fact the two major South American poets he cites in his work here are Parra and the Nicaraguan libertarian theologian priest Ernesto Cardenal.

So a couple examples--short ones however:

Resurrection

Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
Poetry, braver than anyone,
slips in and sinks
like lead
through a lake infinite as Loch Ness
or tragic and turbid as Lake Balaton.
Consider it from below:
a diver
innocent
covered in feathers
of will.
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who's dead
in the eyes of God.

Godzilla in Mexico

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on the TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Overall it is an excellent collection and if you are a Bolano fan you should make sure to pick it up. ( )

Spanish English text. Some great lines, some thoughtfull lines.

By the time an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives was finally released in 2007, he had already passed like a glowing comet, having succumbed to a failing liver in 2003. Bolaño’s novel followed every drunken debauch and whim of a group of young Mexico City poets calling themselves visceral realists, but while the prose was beautifully crafted, the book was starkly short on actual poems.

His biographers make a point of saying that Bolaño’s first love was poetry. Supposedly he only turned to writing novels at the age of 40 after the birth of his son forced him to give up a more bohemian lifestyle. This collection spans his career from 1980 through 1998, the year The Savage Detectives was first published. There are many allusions to the novel and, as in much of his work, some of the same territories are traveled, making this a good companion piece to the novel, or visa versa. Several poems deal with the enigmatic figure of a detective, questioning but never solving the seemingly random and unending violence of South America.

I dreamt of frozen detectives, Latin American detectives
who were trying to keep their eyes open
in the middle of the dream.
I dreamt of hideous crimes
and of careful guys
who were wary not to step in pools of blood
while taking in the crime scene
with a single sweeping glance.

His fascination with forensics would find full flower in 2666, by many accounts, his crowning achievement. At nearly 900 pages, the book is a mammoth project that Bolaño struggled to finish before he died. It is rumored that he even went as far as to postpone a much-needed liver transplant so as to not break stride on his defining work. This struggle is reflected in one of the most moving poems near the end of The Romantic Dogs.

Muse, wherever you
might go
I go.
I follow your radiant trail

across the long night.
Not caring about years
or sickness
Not caring about the pain

or the effort I must make
to follow you. ( )