The Romantic Dogs: Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolano as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet.
Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolano's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Savage Detectives, the best-known novel by the Chilean-born Bola o (1953 2003) recently found spectacular success across the English-speaking world, bringing much attention to his other work. Now comes a very competently rendered bilingual selection of his fiery, if sometimes uncontrolled, verse. Bola o began as a poet, and some of the work here seems to have come from an extraordinarily young man: a record of stormy, untamed teen emotion the depths of despair ("From these nightmares I'll retain only/ these poor houses") or the heights of sexual adventures. Bola o moves easily into a blend of surrealism and populism, with in-your-face gestures learned perhaps from Pablo Neruda, as when he watches "a trail of nurses and a trail of scorpions" wending their ways home. Other poems are closely tied to The Savage Detectives: Bola o's dreamt motorcycle journey in "The Donkey," mirroring the life of the real poet Mario Santiago, will send readers back to the fictionalized portrayals of Bola o and Santiago (Arturo and Ulises) in the novel. Bola o the poet's "deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet" can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse.
