The Marble Head and Other Poems

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

An expatriate of Chile, and now living in Canada, Ludwig Zeller is a visual artist and poet working in the European and Spanish American traditions of surrealism. His poetry is built from situations and images that express those hidden words of subconscious life that are thought to be contrary to the cool powers of reason. Anxiety, fierce appetite, contradictory impulse, terror, obduracy are some of the features of that nether world. We find a man embracing a figure of death disguised as beauty; lovers crawl towards each other along a single suspended rope; a severed head rises in the soup. A range of other violent images — volcanoes, voracious birds, human limbs sprawled akimbo — support these situations with further intimations of the irrational, changed and pent-up creatures that we are. The title poem, “The Marble Head,” expresses in a powerful but obscure image that strange sense we may experience of an alien and determined life dominating our sense of self.

Zeller’s wife, Susana Wald, provides line drawings which are called illustrations to the poems but which are often magnificently forceful and self-sufficient statements in themselves. These poems are translated from the Spanish. It is unfortunate that none are given in the original, to provide some sense of Zeller’s handling of sound and rhythm.