Verbal Society: Poetry and Poets at the End of the Twentieth Century

This epigraph, the inspiration for my title, gives us a condensed version of one possible attitude toward poetry; an approach that situates poetic language not as outside of, but as part of a community of discourses. This is William Rowe's method in Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life (and I borrow the quote from him). Rowe reads a constellation of poets who shift poetry's conventional boundaries to use their work as a means of thinking through contemporary issues; in the process, they alter our expectations as readers. All of the books under review form another kind of society of words, through the association of poets and critical approaches to poetry from the last several years. Their approaches to the genre range from traditional, author-centered biographical readings (Daniel R. Reedy on [End Page 200] Magda Portal and José Quiroga on Octavio Paz, in part) and text-centered readings (Quiroga, Rowe), to readings that open dialogues between poetry and others arts (Hugo Méndez-Ramírez) and situate the poet as an intellectual and political thinker (Quiroga and Yvon Grenier). This array of approaches tells us something about where poetry is today in the cultural assemblage of Latin American arts and letters.