The unnamed mute: verse and image in the poetry of Raúl Zurita

Abstract

At the end of the book titled Zurita (2011) a poem crystallizes in which the poetic thought of the Chilean comes together almost entirely. The poem is composed of twenty-two verses placed, each one, on top of twenty-two photographs - originally taken by Nicolás Piwonka - of the cliffs of the Chilean north coast. The texture, the intensity and the cadence - the sounds that the poem weaves, as well as its tonic syllables, its rhyme and crimp of verse with verse - build a poetic artifice that claims the presence of photography where “unnameable muteness arises. “ In the words of the Chilean, the essay “Poesía y nuevo mundo” from the book Son importantes las estrellas (2017), is about the “glimpse of the unsaid; of a heart without words stuck in the very center of life” (29). “The unmemorable muteness”, to which Zurita refers not only in the collection of essays, but also in his poetry, constitutes one of the most entrenched and endearing presuppositions of his poetic thought.