"During a period of our social history in which profound revolutionary changes are imposed with axiomatic necessity, we have seen that some forms of artistic expression, in a process of reaction when confronted by bourgeois reality, entered into crisis when they attempted to create the image of a new reality."
Fernando Alegría | Reading his Poetry
26 September, 1918 – October 29, 2005
Fernando Alegría left Chile after the military coup in 1973, and, as might be expected, the coup looms large in his poetry. In poems like the hard-hitting and eerie "The Disappeared Will Inherit the Earth" – where the thousands of "disappeared" come back to exact their revenge – Alegría writes of what his country became, and he's not impressed.
In other poems (in both English and Spanish), he writes of revolutions from other parts of South and Central America; he also looks at love, and life, often with a glass of red wine in hand. There are poems as fabulous as the wildest magic realism, while others describe the actions and items of everyday life – although this may not be everyday life as you know it. These are rich poems that repay repeated readings
Fernando Alegría's works include: Allende: A Novel; Changing Centuries: Selected Poems;The Chilean Spring; Chilean Writers in Exile; The Funhouse; The Maypole Warriors; Nueva Historia de la Novela Hispanoamericana; Paradise Lost or Gained; La Poesia Chilena; and Retratos Contemporaneos among others.
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