SOURCE: A review of Antipoems: New and Selected, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 228, No. 8, August 23, 1985, p. 70.

In the following review, the critic praises Parra's Antipoems: New and Selected for reading as naturally as prose.

In any age, poetry, by its solitary and elitist nature, produces few heroes or celebrities, but Parra bids to break the barrier between the poem and the public. Born in Chile in 1914 and educated at Brown and Oxford as a physicist, Parra introduced the idea of the antipoem in 1954, "antipoem" being an ironic contradiction in terms and the signal of an attempt to demystify the form. Initially influenced by such plain-speakers as Whitman, Williams and Auden, Parra has brought an iconoclastic humor and playfulness to poetry that reached its apotheosis in his Jokes to Mislead the Police and Ecopoems, both published in 1983. The short poems from those collections border on the category of graffiti. He...