A Draft of Shadows

Octavio Paz · 1975 CE · Poem · Latin American · Contemporary

Walking back at night into the half-ruined house at Mixcoac where he was raised, the poet finds his grandfather's library, the fig tree in the garden, the mother who stayed and the father who did not, and a boy discovering that words are not the things they name. A long autobiographical poem in blank verse that reads as a life examined rather than a life recounted. Paz wrote it at sixty-one.

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