The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere

The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere is the final collection by Chilean poet Winétt de Rokha. A book of 48 poems written during a journey across Latin America, it is a canto americano, an epic poem that sings of a united América through its land and peoples. The poems give attention to the land and social conditions, mentioning the "banana plantations, rubber plantations, farmlands that produce bloodsuckers", the indigenous peoples such as the jivaro of Peru and Ecuador, local fauna like wolves and wasps, local flora like the clavel del aire or copihue, and popular protests like the Baltimore Workers' Congress. Winétt proposes a new kind of language and a new kind of person, within new economic structures. She does so through the performance of a neobaroque rhetoric that mirrors the América she finds, with a mottled variety to it, a "convulsive labyrinth, uneven, baroque, communicating", with "jumbled qualities". One feels Winétt's pleasure in making her way across an América whose territories had already been given a hundred names by indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived, as she makes visits with her husband Pablo on behalf of a Communist Party that in theory stands for the friendship of peoples and the pursuit of economic and social justice. The world, shaken by recent and ongoing civil and world wars as Winétt and Pablo travelled, seemed to vibrate with imminent catastrophe and change. Winétt's introductory poem announces her intention to create a "song of gold dust" and a "strophe of the day's necessity". "The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere is incorruptibly American," she proclaims. As the critic Javier Bello puts it: "The Valley Loses Its Atmosphere is a book that will require many readings to give an account of its complexity and restore it to the place I believe it should have held-and should still hold - in contemporary Chilean poetry, as one of its most intense and particular moments."