Poetry and Loss: The Work of Eugenio Montejo

Abstract

In a study which covers the entirety of Montejo's career as poet and essayist, this book examines how the work of this seminal Venezuelan writer explores and deals with the experiences of loss in the twentieth century. Focusing on the broad areas of temporal and spatial loss, the analysis underlines the different levels on which such experiences are located in Montejo's writing, from the personal to the national, from the continental to the wider ontological, all filtered through the poet's own lived experience of growing up and writing in Venezuela. It explores how the poetic act emerges throughout as the potential means by which such experiences can be expressed and through which such loss can be reversed and, henceforth, avoided. This represents the first book-length study in English of Montejo's work and the first monograph in any language to offer a sustained thematic analysis of his entire output. In the process, it serves to bring out from the academic shadows one of the most important and commanding poetic voices to emerge from Latin America in the last fifty years.