Landscape of Deep Breaks:
<sub>^{A Poetic Journey from There to Here and Back Again}

Poetry, for me, is like walking the narrow streets of Toledo, Spain. You never know what you’ll find at the end of the street. Walking between houses, their wooden balconies and flower boxes jutting into the space overhead, you might find another street, or a tiny plaza or water fountain, a church, an empty space, the river Tajo. Or even the house of El Greco.</sub>

                                                                                   Eugenia Toledo

<sub>^{From an interview with David Preston}

Chilean-born poet Eugenia Toledo has done her share of wandering in this world, pausing here and there to pluck up an overlooked gem glinting in the sunlight or tuck something precious of her own into a cleft between the rocks—an anonymous gift to some future wanderer.

Toledo began writing poetry as an adolescent in the mid-1960s, when the golden age of Chilean poetry was in full flower. Nobel Prize-winning poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda were household names in Chile during this period, along with other cultural heroes like Víctor Jara, Jorge Teillier, and the Parras.

In the early 1970s, Toledo was a professor of literature at the Catholic University in the southern Chilean city of Temuco, where she had her own writing group, "Semillas" [Seeds]. In 1975, she left Chile for Seattle, enrolling as a literature student at the University of Washington. In 1977 she earned her master’s degree, followed in 1981 by a PhD in Spanish Renaissance Literature. Around 1990, Toledo returned to her writing and gradually began submitting her work to colleagues and literary journals, eventually publishing two volumes of poetry in Spanish.

The poet describes her first volume of émigré poetry, Arquitectura de ausencias [Architecture of Absences] (Torremozas Press, 2006), as "a book of nostalgia for geography left behind, a meditation on nature, on religion, on the search for identity." The second volume, Tiempo de metales y volcanes [Time of Metals and Volcanoes] (400 Elefantes, 2007), is a collection of poems which draw closely on the writer’s childhood experiences in her father’s coal-fired iron foundry in Temuco. "I am the blacksmith of myself," she declares. "For me, writing the poems in this book was like the metal-making process. Think of a crisol [crucible] pouring the molten metal of a thought into the mold of language. That’s how I see poetry—as a kind of literary metallurgy. Tiempo de metales y volcanes, is a book of poetry about poetry, about what poetry is."

In late 2008, Toledo returned to Chile with the Northwest Poet Carolyne Wright on a literary tour sponsored by the cultural exchange group Partners of the Americas. On the tour the women presented workshops, met with Chilean writers, and gave university lectures on the state of American poetry. From this experience Toledo was inspired to write a series of fifty poems, which, thanks to a generous grant from King County’s 4Culture arts organization, will be published in a bilingual volume called Map Traces sometime next year. Carolyne Wright is doing the English translations for that book.

In the introduction to you, my beloved," she Map Traces, Toledo dedicates the book to her native land, addressing it in the same voice she would use to speak to a volcano, a bird, a river, or a mountain. Or to a man. "This book is for writes. "It was written from my errant memories and your oblivion. It was written to exorcise the events of my past and my present from the map of life. For the one who suffers in any corner of the world . . ."</sub>

David Preston is a freelance art critic residing in Seattle, Washington. 

_{Eugenia Toledo will be presenting and discussing Map Traces,
Saturday December 12, at the Seattle Public Library.}