Gabriela Mistral

Reading Mistral – rereading her unceasingly – is to touch the experience of a land and brush against the halo and breath of poetry. Within hers, the strongest materials of the spirit gather: utopia, tragedy, the prophetic. Utopia of what was not, that ghostly round in the void; tragedies of herself and her time; the historical prophecy of dispossession of her own community. Felling, desolation, a sordid winepress are the pained substance of her poem on Chile.