GERMIN ACIÓN DEL ALBA.

Zalamea '42. Mexico, 1960. 119 pp.

Zalamea's third volume of poetry is, in my opinion, his best so far: he now emerges with distinction as a powerful poet of love. This love poetry is more difficult than his previous collections; it is profoundly personal and passionately sensuous, but gives constant evidence of firm artistic control. It is an erotic breviary full of worship for the archetypal figure of a wife-mother; but the author is a poet as well as a lover, an individualistic imagination recreating from remembered experience the poetic figure which he worships as the incarnation of their love.

To be more prosaically analytical, I might point out that this volume is made up of twenty-five closely related little poems, each of them representing a distinct moment or aspect of a chronologically sequential "love story." During most of the volume the woman is far away; later she rejoins him and is pregnant. The title, "Germination of the Dawn," refers to the long night of her absence, to the future child, and, less directly, to the process of poetic creation itself. The basic dramatic situation, the oneway dialogue, does not change: each poem is addressed directly to her, offered as a prayer to her, by the poet-lover. Though its imagery is as sensual as a tropical honeymoon, this poetry is at the same time intensely introspective and spiritual, thus achieving an admirable fusion of the two basic dimensions of erotic love. The third dimension is that of time, which exists as memory and as hope. The past and the future are foreseen as partially coinciding in the child, through whom the father will relive his own childhood, perhaps.

To conclude this brief review of a beautiful little volume, I will attempt to capture in English the poetic passion of a few lines chosen at random:

I'm writing you today as never before, my wife, With hand weighed down by your absence, Erect in my veins the memory of the time Which the two of us converted into eternity, The hours that you gave me, their warmth, The wise understanding of your gaze,Your loneliness, too, which had been van-quished . . .