Defense of the Idol
Defense of the Idol
$15.00
About the Book
Branded a “poète maudit” for the cryptic circumstances surrounding his life and death, Omar Cáceres once tried to destroy all copies of his one and only book. The myth around him survived thanks to the inclusion of fifteen poems from Defense of the Idol in the groundbreaking anthology Antología de poesía chilena nueva from 1935. Presented here for the first time in English translation, along with the sole foreword Vicente Huidobro ever wrote for a poet, the poems of Cáceres possess a ghostly, metaphysical energy combined with modern-age imagery: bows pulsate, moons hurtle, rains sing, trees drag their shadows in drunk stupors, winds break the sky open. But the interior life of the poet assumes dominance, interrogated through anguished, turbulent dreamscapes of language.
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Excerpt
NOCTURNE
The trees are drunk, from the nocturnal lights,
and they drag their shadows, nervous and stiff.
Their shadows, which strangle the night’s winds,
shelter and rattle me, as if I was a bird.
And my steps echo in their black boughs,
and the weakest of hooks fill me with vertigo;
yet when I cast my eye on them from a pair of simpler ones,
they answer me, swaying, that they remained intact…
The leaves, dilating the shared shadows,
return like ruined boats to their tree.
They cannot, oh, attain the solid banks
that the tips of heavenly bodies announce from above,
yet quivering and thick with silence they plow
through deep and freezing ponds of miracle.
And in the nocturnal trees embracing the earth,
I find oblivion and mercy, when in despair,
while the light runs down their boughs,
thin, diaphanous… LIKE WATER BETWEEN MY HANDS!