Beyond the melodramatic events of her brief life, the work of Chilean poet Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921) resists the passage of time with the strangeness of its images of eternity and the beauty of its oneiric song of contemplation, composed amidst the deepest horror.
In Anuarí, Wilms Montt's collection of prose poems which was first published in 1918 and is presented here for the first time in English, in a brilliant translation by Jessica Sequeira, the author seeks to order her thoughts amidst the blur of nightmare, building, layer by layer, a world of dissonant beauty. Though the book has much in common with her other works, such as Sentimental Doubts and In the Stillness of Marble, in the present collection new figures, such as toads, swamps, decapitated heads, tea roses and the "Sly Lady", appear-along, of course, with the spirit of the unrequited lover Anuarí who killed himself in front of her.
A prologue by Ramón del Valle-Inclán also adds insight into the work.
