"A fascinating polarity arises"

Written by Nicholas Birns for Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 106, Vol. 56, No. 1, 2023, 119–120 on Sunday, December 31st, 2023
A fascinating polarity arises when a politically committed poet, trying to convey an intelligible and material message, ends up being very complex. That complexity comes from the attempt to write a poetry of statement. The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo exemplify similar cases of an intense political commitment which actually complicates the poetry. Mir’s poems remind us that the difficulty in trying to be simple is much more imaginatively satisfying than a mere display of complexity for its own sake. [...] In showing the most difficult and refractory side of Mir’s work, Cohen has opened the eyes of the reader to the poet’s impressive overall achievement.