The Flights of Zarza

"The Flights of Zarza", published in 1992, appeared in the decade in which democratic rule returned to Argentina after seven years of brutal dictatorship and state terror, a period which Kofman, a Jew, likened to Germany before and during the Second World War. The post-dictatorship years of the late 80s were characterised by their rampant consumerism and hyper-inflation, and in an environment that was becoming more and more like a US shopping mall, poetry seemed like one of the last bastions of the 'internal voice', no longer an escape from military repression but a refuge for the literary language of a whole society. For Kofman, however, as Andrew Graham-Yooll explains in his illuminating introduction to this book, this was not the end but a new beginning, and his poetry expresses the divide between the past and the need to move on, the break of the new poetry of the 90s with the politics of the 70s.Kofman's fourth published collection is very much part of this new expression as it follows the androgynous Zarza (here a pugnacious male, there a seductive female) in his/her travels the length and breadth of Argentina and beyond. Its images are strong and colourful, its narrative vigorous, and its language direct, all of which make for an exciting first encounter, in Ian Taylor's superb translation, with this outstanding Argentinean poet.