From the Prologue of A rienda suelta

January 18, 2006 “This book is an animal of discovery, if I may say that, uncovering the new America that runs through each of these pages. It is not that his other lyrical pieces, such as El poeta de Vidrio and the collection Del aire a la mano do not shine with their own brilliant light, nor that I do not heed the wonder of his narrative nor, even less, his critical analyses which reach enlightenment, but rather it is that airy and diamantine construction that touches me in a singular fashion. An imaginary buzzing and a real buzzing cut and open the game with such masterly poetic control that one arrives at the point of bewitched enchantment until one’s own brain finally registers what is, according to [the Venezuelan poet] Sanchez Pelaez, that which is fleeing and permanent.”

“If there is still someone walking around soliciting imagination in order to decipher the World, these pages flow torrentially with it, embarking from a treatment of temporal vertigo that goes beyond works and days. [The French philosopher] Bachelard, the poet of the instant, says that the creative word is vertical time and not horizontal; and this is amply accomplished in each of the seventy-one flashes of lightening of this cosmos. A cosmos which foresees chaos at a distance, and it is there that these original visions appear.”


From Armando Romero: A rienda suelta. Buenos Aires: Ultimo Reino Editores, 1991


Note on the author
Gonzalo Rojas, the Chilean poet, is one of the most important poets of twentieth-century Latin America. He has won the most important poetry award in the Hispanic World, the Reina Sofia de Poesia Iberoamericana Award, which is given personally by the Queen of Spain. Gonzalo Rojas has been a professor of poetry at several universities in Chile, Europe and the United States.