Nicanor Parra can write stark and beautiful poetry. He seems to be performing, on Spanish, somewhat the same operation that was earlier done on the English language by writers like Williams and Hemingway, trimming away the excess accumulations of “literary tradition,” in order to reestablish the intimate connection of sounds and things. At the same time, Parra is, simply, another possible mode of consciousness in Latin American verse. Alongside Neruda's eloquence and Vallejo's daring, we also have the abrasiveness of Parra. The following is from “I Wake Up at Dawn”:

excommunicated for smelling bad
and look out the one-eyed turret
the blood of a scruffy moon
is dripping
into a snow-filled garden
and then the foreman's voice:
get up you dumb shits
you're supposed to be through breakfast
          already!

It is not just abrasiveness that distinguishes Parra from most of the Spanish-language poets one reads in this country. He is also an international voice of our moment. If he has roots in some folk culture, it doesn't show up in Emergency Poems, which are the kind of bare-bones statements one might expect to find in postwar European verse. This is partly a matter of Parra's flat style.

Not counting
The twenty million missing
How much do you think the deifica-
          tion of Stalin
Came to in cold, hard cash.

But it also has to do with his attitude toward the things he writes about.

We act like rats
in spite of the fact that we're gods
spread our wings a little
and we'll look human
but we prefer to go on all fours

Or, speaking of his own nation, Chile:

We think we're a country
the truth is we're barely a landscape.

Parra is not a “revolutionary” writer, at least in the inspirational sense. His poetry is often weary and sarcastic, filled with gloomy wisdom. In fact, the sarcasm is often too easy, the epigrams—such as the one about Chile—too shallow under their scorn. Or too suggestive of a kind of bourgeois grumbling that reveals, most of all, boredom with the self. In modern European poetry, this mood of petulance and generalized distaste has become the conventional way of looking at the world, so much so that poets almost assume such a mood to be an essential part of what “poetry” is. In Parra's own culture (or in the United States) this has not been so overwhelmingly the case. And his earlier collection, Poems and Antipoems, though at least as harsh as Emergency Poems, never seemed to be less than passionately involved with the human race and its prospects. In Emergency Poems the anger is still there, but it sometimes lacks depth.

I would have spared that priceless life
if it had been up to me
but how is Death who doesn't respect
          Tom
going to respect Dick, Harry, or What-
          ever-his-name-is?

Nevertheless, Parra can still be a powerful writer. One of the most successful pieces in Emergency Poems is “I Uncork Another Bottle,” in which he gracefully dismantles the routines of modern life, first by flexing his imagination,

I stretch a leg
it could just as well be an arm
I fold an arm
it could just as well be a leg

and then by getting down to the serious implications of what he's done.

I start to get out of my sweater
at this moment the telephone rings
they call me from Mrs. Office
I'm going to keep dancing I tell them
until they give me a raise

The light-footed elegance of this progression, and its mixture of whimsy and bitter knowledge, are like Charlie Chaplin's subversive moments.

This poem (and a few others, like “I Wake Up at Dawn”), is closely tied to the common experience. It is when Parra speaks with his own voice, as an “intellectual,” that he sometimes falls prey to the literary maladies glanced at here. At other times, he is still as direct as ever.