Figures of Speech: Poems by Enrique Lihn

The appearance of a posthumous selected poems often provides the illusion of completeness--to a life and career; but a close reading of Lihn's work demonstrates how a struggle with a sense of wholeness occupied most of his attentions, making this books all the more poignant. Lihn (1929-1988) is one of Chile's foremost poets, yet, despite a collection published by New Directions in 1978 (The Dark Room and Other Poems) and an earlier translated volume from 1969, he has not acquired the reputation in the States of his countryman Pablo Neruda. This careful, liberal selection--from the poet's first pamphlet to his deathbed poems, but explicitly not including his political poems and long poems such as ""Written in Cuba""--by Lihn's friend and translator Oliphant, goes far to redress this situation. Showing his modernist heritage, Lihn's expressionist self-portrait opens the collection, and describes the young hero as social-neurotic, though in decidedly un-Prufrockian tones. Of the eight sections here, the Lorca-esque ""Brooklyn Monster"" series, written during travels in New York, Texas, Canada and Spain, sounds the most contemporary, and foregrounds the poet's dealings with the contradictory value systems of the Northern hemisphere. The ""Art and Life"" section considers artists such as Turner and Kandinsky, but also contains Lihn's most humble, and most affirmative credo on art and society, one that imagines a totality in which art object and viewer can be seen, for a brief moment, as one. The several poems from Lihn's deathbed are (as the translator notes), among the most moving written in the last century, but they lack the vigorous descriptions and satiric tableaux of the early poems, and do not carry over as well. One hopes that comparative literature departments will take note of this important collection. (Feb.)