SOURCE: "The Poems of José Donoso," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XII, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 70-6.

[In the following essay, Agosin discusses Donoso's Poems of a Novelist, praising the author's willingness to write in a genre that is not his usual form.]

Donoso is a narrator of images, of hallucinatory scenographies that take on life beyond the text, beyond writing and the reader. From his early stories to the majestic Obscene Bird of Night Donoso appears as a great seeker of portraits, of bewitching and overwhelming images; but the images of old houses predominate, houses through which memory perambulates like the typically phantasmagoric and unreal characters. This is why readers and critics alike were surprised when Donoso published a book of poems.

A kind of collective tenderness took hold of the Chilean literary milieu regarding this novelist who seemed to have returned to an innocent adolescence in...