The Complete Poetry

Despite his short life, Peru’s César Vallejo’s body of poetry is worthy of inclusion among that of the last century’s great Spanish-language poets: Rubén Darío, Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca. This volume collects the two books published during Vallejo’s lifetime, as well as the posthumous poems, for the first time with a sole translator. Mario Vargas Llosa’s foreword and Efraín Kristal’s introduction might be reason enough to buy the book, but a single read-through puts The Complete Poetry on the must-have list. The early poems’ tension between carnality and divinity, his Whitman-esque invocation of the voice of his people and the transition to more political and prose poems, taken all at once, are proof positive of the range Vallejo’s command of a luxurious language granted him.