Summa de Maqroll el Gaviero. Poesía reunida. (Summary of Maqroll the Lookout: Collected Poems)

Reviewed by Salwa Jabado, New York City -- Críticas, 5/15/2008

Mutis, Álvaro.
Colombia/U.S.: Alfaguara: Santillana. 2008. 304p. ISBN 978-958-704-716-5. pap. $24.99. POETRY

Overshadowed by contemporaries Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, Mutis is nevertheless an influential and widely read Colombian author whose writing has garnered the top awards in Spanish letters: the Premio Miguel de Cervantes (2001) and the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras (1997). He is celebrated for his picaresque character, Maqroll the Lookout, often called a modern-day seafaring Don Quixote, and perhaps best known to English readers through Edith Grossman’s translation of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll (New York Review Books Classics, 2002). While bearing Maqroll’s name, this collection of poetry is not another in the fiction series but a summary of his creator’s poetry since 1947. Some poems, such as the prose poem “La nieve del almirante” (“The Admiral’s Snow”), served to launch the Maqroll series (the first novella bears the same title). Others, such as the “Cada Poema” (“Each Poem”), touch on the writing of poetry itself: “Cada poema un pájaro que huye/ del sitio señalado por la plaga” (“Each poem a bird that flees/ the site signaled by the plague”). Some titillate, like the ending of “Ángelo Gambitzi”: “Mujeres que alzan sus vestidos/ para gemir con su sexo desnudo/ y la luz de sus nalgas/ la eficacia de la Conquista” (“Women who lift up their dresses/ to wail with their naked sex/ and the bareness of their buttocks/ the effectiveness of the Conquest”). Others are simply beautiful, such as “Hija eres de los Lágidas” (“Daughter you are of the Lágidas”). A compendium of the masterworks as well as minor works of a great author; recommended for all libraries and bookstores.

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