Editorial Review:
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Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolaño as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."
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Reader Reviews for The Romantic Dogs:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: I Admire the Poet's Prose ...
Comment: In fact, I regard several of Roberto Bolaño's highly original prose works as major masterpieces of our times. There are passages in "Distant Star" and "By Night in Chile" that could be clipped and recast as 'found poems', and that would resonate more poetically than any of the pieces in this collection. Bolaño's prose, I have to say, is more musical than his poetry, and a lot more "thought-provoking," yet Bolaño himself is supposed to have declared more satisfaction with his poems than with his novels. Of course, writers aren't always the best judges of their own works.
This is a bi-lingual edition, by the way. If you are able to read Spanish, you'll find that "much is lost" in the translations of his complex prose to English. Hardly anything is lost in the translation of these poems. For sure, there are lines that sound better in Spanish, but curiously there are also lines that sound better in English. Bolaño eschews any and all forms of beautification of language in his verse. His style is remarkably close to that of the Beat poets of the American '50s, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, and others, though Bolaño is even grimmer and deliberately coarser and never approaches the 'fireworks' of language that Allen Ginsburg achieved in 'Howl' and other poems. I'd say he's a second-tier Beat poet at best. Of course he had "other fish to fry" and other traditions to defy. Whereas Kerouac as a poet had Robert Lowell to try to dethrone, Bolaño had Pablo Neruda as his poetic antithesis, and it's clear that a love/hate obsession drove Bolaño to attempt above all to besmirch and scarify the Apollonian beauty of Neruda's lyricism.
Obviously I don't much favor Bolaño's poetic intentions, but I could overcome that prejudice and admire his craft, as I admire the craft of Cavafy, for instance, without much enjoying the poems, but for one large problem: I don't find much craft in these 'canine' yelps. Bolaño's defiantly 'rough' poetry seems pathetically juvenile and petty to me.
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Summary: A literary classic
Comment: God this book is heavy. We are talking 30 years of poetry from a man who has often been called the most important voice in Latin American literature. This book is like great sex on a humid night in Chile. The poems take you deep into the longings, painful memories, joyous highs and becomings of a young poet who uses language to do holy miracles.
Roberto Bolano's Romantic Dogs is intoxicating throughout and resists the despair that plagues most poets of his generation. Indeed Bolano never loses his sense of humor or zeal for life. His love for the world's vagabonds parallels works by North American poets Saul Williams, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and Eric Wilkinson, Black Through A Distortion Pedal. I see these three poets as a holy trinity of sorts. Each poet is situated within the historical context and culture of his own artistry but the common thread in all three is the enduring ability to believe in and love humanity in all its incarnations.
I often find the cliche that "good poetry is timeless" to be absurd but Bolano actually tempts me to make such a claim. His poems illuminate the wonderful dignity of people and the artist's eternal push to redeem our majesty.
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Summary: For those who can accept not metric poetry
Comment: He was a great writer. I wonder how long would it take him to get the Nobel.I prefer him as a novelist, but there are some poems I read aloud, several times, just for my pleasure. Worthwhile, indeed, but, not for everyone...
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Summary: The Romantic Dogs
Comment: While I disagree with Bolano about him being a better poet than a novelist, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. I didn't read this because I like poetry, I read it because I like Bolano.
If you're like me, where you're not a huge reader of poetry but a huge fan of Bolano nonetheless, you should definitely pick it up. Most of these poems are excellent, and even the not-so-great ones are still worth reading. Here is one of my favorite poems from the collection:
I dreamt of frozen detectives, Latin American Detectives
who were trying to keep their eyes open
in the middle of the dream.
I dreamt of hideous crimes
and of careful guys
who were wary not to step in pools of blood
while taking in the crime scene
with a single sweeping glance.
I dreamt of lost detectives
in the convex mirror of the Arnolfinis:
our generation, our perspectives,
our models of fear.
These poems show an emotional level you generally don't encounter in his fiction, from creepy paranoia to stripped down poems of love and thankfulness. This deserves to be checked out by fans of Bolano and poetry in general.
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Summary: A Savage Consistency
Comment: With "2666," Roberto Bolano is now a sensation in the United States. "2666" is a remarkable book, full of engrossing narratives; however, I find "The Romantic Dogs" in some respects more satisfying.
It is common knowledge that Bolano considered himself first and foremost a poet and I believe he is right, although his fame here in America will derive from his fiction.
Many reviewers have spent all their time talking about Bolano and Chile, as if "The Romantic Dogs" is only a political book. However, I wonder if the reviewers made it past the first poem. Yes, there are poems that make reference to political events but how can a Latin American not be political. However, politics are only a part of the soup of existence. Bolano writes about being in the sense that a philosopher writes about being.
"The Romantic Dogs" is an amazingly cohesive work. This is not a collection of poems written as one-offs. Instead, the poems hold together through various rhetorical devices: repetition of images, symbols, and themes.
The overall theme of the work is the shortness of life, the cruelty of illness, the fragility of existence, and the the beauty of poetry.
Unifying images are dreams, blackness, white worms, snow, cars, motorcycles, burros, films, detectives.
Bolano announces in the first poem of the collection that the dream of poetry opened up the void of his spirit and accompanied him through his life.
The first poem of the collection, "The Romantic Dogs," announces this theme. "I'd lost a country/but won a dream." He adumbrates the importance of poetry in the penultimate poem of the collection "Muse:" "she's the guardian angel/ of our prayers./ She's the dream that recurs."
"The Romantic Dogs" presents a brave story--because ultimately Bolano is a dramatic poet--of a dying poet fighting to remain here in being "with the romantic dogs."
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