[In the following excerpt, McClatchy reviews The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987.]

In the prologue to his magisterial study of Sor Juana, as part of a meditation on “the system of implicit authorizations and prohibitions” in modern culture, Octavio Paz speculates that the democratic and progressivist societies dominant in the West since the late eighteenth century are constitutionally hostile to certain literary genres. Bourgeois rationalism and poetry, for instance, are oil and water. The methods and attitudes, the very nature of poetry has grown hostile to the dogmas of the day and the cult of the future, to the moral pieties of modern society. Poetry is a violation. Baudelaire and the Symbolists, the pioneers of Modernism, the Surrealists—these were enemies within the walls, and remain the champions of all those forces opposed to the relentless progress of twentieth-century life.

There is more than a little truth in Paz's view of history, and more than a little self-justification. Certainly those champions have been his masters, and his career has been devoted to the idea that as “an operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation.” Though it reveals the world and its correspondances, it denies history. It is simultaneously the voice of the people, the language of the elect, and the word of the solitary. Like those of his Modernist masters, Paz's poems have preferred the fragmentary and ecstatic, the discoveries of chance and dream, the infernal landscape of the city, nostalgic glimpses of paradisal literature from the past, the unredeemable self in extremis. Such views derive largely from European models, and have put Paz in one camp (along with Borges, he has been a sort of major general) of a continuing battle that rages (or used to) in Latin America as in its northern neighbor. He himself tells the story of meeting, decades ago, Gabriela Mistral. She had just won the Nobel Prize, and asked the young, unknown Paz to show her his poems. He sent a slim volume. A few days later, she greeted him at a party with that slightly too formal politeness one understands to be a reproof: “I like your poems,” she said, “though they are not at all what I feel. You could well be a European poet; for my taste, you are not telluric enough.” What she meant by the peculiar term is that Paz was airborne rather than deeply rooted, a cosmopolite rather than a native. Any Latin American writer, he would counter, is actually both, working between the traditions of European civilization and the realities of American culture. The convergence appears even, or first, in the language itself. The Spanish of Spain is pure, solid, substantialist; the Spanish of Latin America is a hybrid, “sometimes a mask, sometimes a passion—never a habit.”

Masks and passions would likewise describe the surface, the sound, of this new Collected Poems. The book picks up where Early Poems: 1935-1955, published fifteen years ago by New Directions, leaves off, and with these two volumes the reader will have most of Paz's poems, attractively presented and fluently translated. The past three decades have taken Paz far afield, most notably during his years as the Mexican Ambassador to India, and resulted in some of his strongest work. But I'll confess I have always preferred Paz's essays to his poems. Only in prose does the full range of his extraordinary mind stand revealed, its breadth of reference and brilliance of analogy. The poems, oddly, seem more one-dimensional. They are nearly always lyrics; there is no narrative, little portraiture or evocation of specific places, not much variety of tone. He is a poet of phrases, what he calls “a succession of signs,” as if sustained argument would somehow handicap a poem's spontaneity. Surrealist gestures, “the apple of fire on the tree of syntax,” electrify by moments, but are often merely scintillant sparks. Other rhetorical gestures are more grandiose, but hollow:

The things were buried deep in themselves
and my eyes of flesh saw them
weary of being, realities
stripped of their names. My two eyes
were souls grieving for the world.
On the empty street the presence
passed without passing, vanishing
into the forms, fixed in its changes,
and turned now into houses, oaks, snow, time.
Life and death flowed on, blurred together.

There are worse examples of this same sort of vatic mannerism throughout the new collection, though it is fair to say it sounds flatter in English than in Spanish.

What here seems a fault is elsewhere a virtue of Paz's restless search for the world behind the world. “Poetry is not truth,” he says in “San Ildefonso Nocturne,” “it is the resurrection of presences.” The best poems here are rites. What we get is an invocation of powers, a litany of images, the ascent to vision, and the ritualistic struggle of opposing psychic and mythic forces. If Paz sometimes seems impatient to get beyond language, at other times he celebrates the textuality of the self. Here is an exuberant Whitmanian flourish:

                              entering yourself you're not leaving the world, there are
rivers and volcanoes inside your body, planets and ants,
                              empires, turbines, libraries, gardens sail through your blood,
                              there are animals, plants, beings from other worlds, galaxies
wheel through your neurons,
                              entering yourself you enter this world and the other worlds,
                              you enter what the astronomer saw in his telescope, the
mathematician in his equations:
                              disorder and symmetry, accidents and rhymes, duplications and
mutations,
                              the St. Vitus dance of the atom and its particles, the cells
reproducing, the stellar inscriptions.

This new collection falls into three parts. At the heart of the earlier work here is the long poem that first brought Paz to the attention of an international audience, Sunstone (1957). Reading it is rather like listening to Messiaen's Turangalila: you're overwhelmed, but don't want to repeat it very often. Memory's “swimming flame”—at once sensuous and metaphysical—flickers in corners of his life, and on the faces of women he has loved. And it's right that this poem be placed first in a volume that is obsessed with women: with real women, like his wife and mother; with the idea of woman, fertile and mysterious, Mother India or the anima mundi or “the feminine void”; and finally with woman as the type of the muse, the lyric, the imagination, la palabra, the word itself, “stainless / promiscuous / speechless / nameless.”

With Ladera Este (East Slope, 1968) we move with Paz to India, and to material congenial to his mystical temperament but also exotic enough to be transcribed into poems much denser, richer than before. Like India itself, these poems are a collage of details both elemental and quotidian. The waking dream of Orientalism calls forth from Paz some of his most sharply observed and powerful lines. Let this brief excerpt from “A Tale of Two Gardens” stand for his intentions:

                                                            It rained,
the earth dressed and became naked,
snakes left their holes,
the moon was made of water,
                                                                                                                        the sun was water,
the sky took out its braids
and its braids were unraveled rivers,
the rivers swallowed villages,
death and life were jumbled,
dough of mud and sun,
season of lust and plague,
season of lightning on a sandalwood tree,
mutilated genital stars
                                                                                                    rotting,
reviving in your womb,
                                                                                                              mother India,
girl India,
drenched in semen, sap, poisons, juices.

Paz does not always take the panoramic view. His close-ups, with their posed images and eerie stillnesses, can be very affecting. Here is a short poem entire, called “The Key of Water”:

After Rishikesh
the Ganges is still green.
The glass horizon
breaks among the peaks.
We walk upon crystals.
Above and below
great gulfs of calm.
In the blue spaces
white rocks, black clouds.
You said:
                                        Le pays est plein de sources.
That night I dipped my hands in your breasts.

This poem is one of five in the volume that was translated by Elizabeth Bishop. (There are a few others translated by Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, John Frederick Nims, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Lysander Kemp.) Though Eliot Weinberger's translations seem authoritative, Bishop's work immediately stands out next to his: her choices are poetic rather than appropriate.

In 1968 Paz resigned his post in New Delhi to protest the massacre by government troops of student demonstrators in Mexico City. After a stay in England and the United States, where he taught at Harvard and Texas, he returned to Mexico in 1971, and the title of his next book, Vuelta (Return, 1975), indicates his spiritual turn back towards Mexican themes. The title poem itself is a stinging jeremiad that scans from the hilltop of indignation the city which has swallowed up his native village:

                                                            On corners and in plazas
on the wide pedestals of the public squares
the Fathers of the Civic Church
a silent conclave of puppet buffoons
neither eagles nor jaguars
                                                                                buzzard lawyers
locusts
                                        wings of ink           sawing mandibles
ventriloquist coyotes
                                                            peddlers of shadows
beneficent satraps
                                                  the cacomistle          thief of hens
the monument to the Rattle and its snake
the altar to the mauser and the machete
the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman
rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement.

Paz's most recent work, Arbol Adentro (A Tree Within, 1988) is the last section of this book, but as a courtesy to readers who have all the earlier books it has also been published simultaneously and separately by New Directions. Though it contains a remarkable poem, “Preparatory Exercise,” which speculates about his own death, this generous group is hardly valedictory; it includes some of Paz's most vigorous work. There is a suite of poems addressed to painters—among them, Balthus, Miró, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Matta, and Alechinsky—that set out to recreate the surfaces and moods of their paintings. In other poems too, the economy of the visionary and the descriptive, the prophetic and the panegyric, is wonderfully balanced. I finished this book convinced that Paz stands out like a ziggurat in the literary landscape of Mexico. And though to North American tastes much of his poetry will seem like a rather inflated throwback, Paz remains, at seventy-five, one of the truly imposing figures in the cultural life of the New World.