Poetry
Piezas líricas
Not translated into English
Ileana Espinel · 1957
Synopsis
Short poems in which death is not an awaited end but a companion already present. The speaker says she is dead while alive, carries centuries in her few years, and receives in her own room a life that comes to visit her death. Elsewhere she writes that what makes her suffer is not a heartbreak, but her life in death, and that she strips the petals from her faith and dies when she sings.
Context
The collection was published in Guayaquil in 1957. Its author had until then published only in the collective volume of the Club 7, which appeared in 1954, alongside David Ledesma Vásquez and Miguel Donoso Pareja. The most frequently cited pieces in the book, “Septiembre 2” and “La inefable ráfaga”, set out the relation between writing and death, and Andrea Torres Armas has traced in it the remedies and the sick body, which run through the whole work.
Who it is for
In Spanish; poems by the author have appeared in English, Portuguese, French, Italian and Greek, but not this collection. The pieces are brief and can be read separately.
Prizes and reception
Its author's favourite collection and the most acclaimed of her work; printed in fifteen hundred copies, the first to earn her any money.
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