SOURCE: Rosenthal, David. “Nicanor Parra's Hard-Edged Poetry.” Nation 215, no. 3 (7 August 1972): 91-92.

In the following review, Rosenthal finds Emergency Poems somewhat lacking in depth but notes that when Parra avoids being overly literary his poems continue to be brilliant expressions of the common human experience.

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...