This first volume of the complete poetic works of Jorge Luis Borges contains his first three books of poetry: Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925) and Cuaderno de San Martín (1929). Borges spent his early childhood in Buenos Aires, moved to Switzerland when he was fifteen, and moved back to Buenos Aires when he was twenty two (at least so says Wikipedia). These poems, then, are an exaltation of a city, a country and a culture that he is looking at both in terms of his childhood memories and his present observations as a young man who has returned to his home city after a significant amount of time away. As he puts it,

This city that I believed to be my past
is my future, my present;
the years that I have lived in Europe are illusory,
I was always (and always will be) in Buenos Aires.

This dual perspective on Argentina and Buenos Aires was especially compelling to me because I moved back to my hometown this year after seven or eight years away. I was 18 when I left and I'm 26 now. Sometimes I see faces and wonder if I once knew them many years ago, or I visit places that I faintly remember from my childhood. Borges's perspective as a returning native of a city, and his observations filtered through childhood memories, were very relatable to my situation, and I enjoyed feeling this connection with the author.

I also liked reading the poems of young Borges, and seeing the beginnings of the themes and ponderings that would continue in his later and more famous short fiction and essays. The poems are very much centered on traditional Argentine images and subjects: gauchos, arrabales, zaguanes, patios, and his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, who faught on the frontier in the Buenos Aires army. Naturally enough, there is also a poem on Juan Manuel de Rosas. While the poetry does not stray far topically from the Argentine canon, there are hints at Borges's later examinations of things like infinity and immortality. He ends his poem on Rosas by stating that:

God will have already forgotten him
and it is less injurious than piteous
to delay his infinite dissolution
with alms of hate.

I really enjoyed this idea of Rosas being charitably kept alive through the hatred of the descendants of Unitarios decades after his death. Moments like these are what makes these volumes of poetry so interesting to me: Borges, in representing his own childhood city and country as he sees it after returning, also sets the wheels spinning on many of the obsessions and ponderings that he will continue to develop over his literary life. I also enjoyed the author's commentary to each of his three volumes, with a blind, elderly Borges briefly looking back on the poetry of his youth, identifying the flaws and pointing out the moments that he was the most proud of when looking back on his work. ( )