Juana de Ibarbourou
The Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou (1895-1979) earned a world-wide reputation in 1918 with the publication of her first book, Las Lenguas de Diamante. Her prose poems in El Cántaro Fresco (1920) were hailed by critics as vivid word-paintings of her childhood memories. Raíz Salvaje (1922) and La Rosa de los vientos (1930) proved her staying power as a poet. De Ibarbourou’s early work often focused on love, passion, and a keen spiritual longing. In the midst of love, she thinks of death; when she longs for death and oblivion, the beauty of a flower or a bird’s song calls her back to the physical world. She flies to a new world in a seagull ship, or shouts to the stars, trying to leap off the wheel of life, but her feet, her senses, are anchored in this world. The scope of her poems is far beyond simple celebrations of beauty, or passionate love poems; in fact, they take the reader on a profound mystical journey. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959.