Description

INRI responds to the need to find a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of volcanoes and into the sea. In order to bring this event, which was neither seen nor heard, into language, Zurita invents a form and language capable of bringing it into the present. The one place where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the landscape of Chile: the mountains, desert, and sea. There the event might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are no places from which to speak, ‘the stones cry out’.

INRI is written as poetry without regular lines or metre. In the tradition of Whitman or Ginsberg’s Howl, it works with long breaths and large blocks of meaning: intensities that overrun the usual measures of speech and syntax. To read it is to experience a strange force pulsing through the language, breaking apart its usual channels, and opening unseen and unheard zones.

Zurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is one of the best known poets of Latin America. His work is part of a revolution in poetic language that began in the 1970s and sought to find new forms of expression, radically different from those of Pablo Neruda. The challenge was to confront the contemporary epoch, with its particular forms of violence, including violence done to language. INRI is distinctive in that it does not speak out of individual sorrow, though this is not missing from the text, but seeks, rather, a new space, out of which love might be asserted as prime human reality, a space which might give birth to a different type of society.

Published by Marick Press

Author(s)

William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of several books on Latin American Poetry.