Within the tradition of modern Venezuelan poetry, Eugenio Montejo (1938–2008),nom de plumeof Eugenio Hernández Álvarez, is a central figure. Recent years have witnessed an increasing recognition, both within and beyond the confines of his homeland, of his importance in Venezuela’s literary history, and have seen the rapid growth of his reputation as one of the most notable individual literary voices to emerge not just from Venezuela but from Latin America generally in the twentieth century. Such recognition culminated in his being awarded the Premio Internacional Octavio Paz de Poesía y Ensayo 2004. Despite this prominence, Montejo’s work...

In his first two major collections of poetry,Élegos(1967) andMuerte y memoria(1972),¹ Eugenio Montejo presents us with the foundations of what will become his poetic universe. Much like the actual universe, these early poetic building blocks constitute not so much a stage which will be left behind, buried under the subsequent pages of poetry, as one which grows by expansion, the symbols, concerns, and topoi becoming more complex and intertwined, but the essential matter out of which all is, ultimately, formed remaining the same.

As their titles indicate, these early collections are bound up with death and...

At the end of the previous chapter I alluded to the connection between (linear) time and language in Montejo’s work. However, such a connection is not just a matter of the language of Montejo’s poetry reflecting the inevitable succession of moments in ‘la estructura lineal presente-pasado-futuro’ (BC, 42). Neither is it simply a case of language being ‘on the side of the living’ and hence failing to bring the dead back without converting them ‘en otra cosa’ (AM, 202), although both these elements are present in Montejo’s poetics, as I have shown. The connection is more fundamental. Earlier we saw...

In the preceding chapters I have focused on the broad sense of temporal loss in Montejo’s work, taking such loci as the childhood homestead and the poet’s father’s bakery as leitmotivs through which the effects of temporal – and temporolinguistic – loss are presented. But the importance of these locales in their own right attunes us to the fact that the overriding sense of loss in Montejo’soeuvreis played out in terms of place and habitat as well. It is a thematic which is most prominent in the collections of Montejo’s mid-period, that is,Algunas palabras,Terredad,Trópico absoluto, andAlfabeto...

If a sense of general alienation and separation from nature and the earth forms a central part of Montejo’s poetics, it is nevertheless important to note that, as with the concern for temporal loss, the setting against which this lamentation is played out is specifically that of a Venezuelan poet in Venezuelanpaisajes, with the latter representing tropical and American landscapes more widely. Consequently, there is a need to understand that Montejo’s poetics is concerned not simply with the human condition, but also with the specificities of the Venezuelan condition. It is on this aspect of Montejo’s work that I...

In tackling both temporolinguistic loss and the loss of an essential home or being-on-the-earth and in Venezuela, I have shown how Montejo repeatedly ties the space of the poem to the apparently authentic times and places to which he appeals: his childhoodcasa, the bakers’taller, theterredadof the naturalcanto del gallo, and the poetic construction of home. It is the authentic poetic space that appears as the mythic, timeless locale for which Montejo strives in his work, and it is, thus, through the work of the poet that such poetic authenticity is to be (re)found and (re)forged....