Cecilia Vicuña

Vicuna's Instan is a book in five parts, the first of which contains a series of line drawings. These appear to be pencil sketches that “look like” constellations drawn onto the sky, with the letters of the words taking the position of individual stars, or waves or insect swarms, each letter a bee or fly or mosquito, or particles as in particle physics (parachute physics) or strings as in String Theory. Letters fly, drip, fall, buzz around the page. Tracers. Part two is the poem "Instan" which recapitulates the words and words within words of the drawings. Many words are cognates in English, Spanish and Quechua, the poet's 3 languages. In fact, the poem slips constantly back and forth between Spanish and English, as if the poet in her role of simultaneous translator is whispering into headphones worn by her reader. Vicuna explains in her "carta or end note" (Part 4 of the book)that "Instan is the third person plural of the infinitive 'instar.' meaning 'to urge, press, reply,' It first appears in Spanish in 1490, and is associated with political demands. In English it means 'to stud with stars.' For me it suggests a movement inward, towards the sta, the inner star 'standing' in the verb 'to be': estar." The above quote gives a taste of the sort of Language Poetry Vicuna engages in, one that presents, in shifty fashion, a word's lexical, cognitive, emotional, historical and even metaphysical personas. The third part of the book is a poem entitled "fabulas del comienzo y restos del origen/ fables of the beginning and remains of the origin," an unpictured poem which concerns itself with the "dawn of speech," language's relationship to time, silence, juxtaposition and conjugation and the preverbal. Finally, Instan ends with a "dixio/nary a diction" which both reiterates and expands on the elucidation of the words in the preceding poems. The book as a whole is visually appealing, musical, and linguistically challenging, in short, a pleasurable reading experience.

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This is a collection of poetry by four poets of indigenous Chilean (Mapuchean) descent, most of which have not been published previously. The poems deal with the lives of Mapucheans, who make up approximately 1 million of the 14 million Chilean population, and who only recently have been accorded full rights and increasing recognition by the government and majority community. These works are about the history and ancestry of the Mapuchean culture, and their place in the world (according to one author, "Mapuche" means "People of the Earth", and the culture emphasizes that humans are part of the earth, but do not own it, and must respect all of its inhabitants). Other poems deal with the cultural displacement and discrimination faced by Mapucheans, and the death of beloved ancestors and family members. Most of the poems were good, and several were noteworthy.

This book was published in 1998 by the Latin American Literary Review Press, and is part of the Poetry in Indigenous Language series, along with Pichka Harawikuna: Five Quechua Poets.… (mehr)