Description

Temblor de cielo was written in 1928. A more unified work than its contemporary, Altazor--although published in 1931, that work was longer in gestation--this might owe more to its style of delivery: an ecstatic outpouring of words that largely revolve around the themes of love, sex and death. The Isolde to whom much of the poem is addressed is an idealised feminine figure--part goddess, part idealised beloved, part Isolde from Wagner's opera and part Ximena Amun tegui, the young woman who had become the poet's second wife. The poem is also a sustained lyric effusion of a kind that Huidobro had never produced before, and it marks the point at which his work moves on from the barnstorming avant-garderie of his younger years to a more mature style, albeit one influenced by surrealism, a movement which Huidobro had previously attacked.