Feather of a Featherless Bird
Feather of a featherless bird / Pluma de un Pájaro Desplumado, a bilingual collection of poems by Juan Garrido Salgado, covers a wide range of themes from the intimate and personal to the political and social, focusing mainly on the onslaught of fascism in the world and the dehumanisation of this era of digital domination and colonialism and wars, among which the genocide against the Palestinian people stands out. Poetry that expresses the loneliness, isolation and pain of existence, while resisting with words to reveal ‘what is silenced, what is hidden and what is denied’. The use of the bird as a representation of the poet, and of birds and their wings and feathers as metaphors for the creation of the poems themselves, weaves through the book the poetic voice that cries out for love and freedom, and asks, ‘Where are we going / Humanity anchored in the unreason of an elite / We are agony of thousands, dust of riddled stars.’
Juan Garrido-Salgado immigrated to Australia from Chile in 1990, fleeing the regime that burned his poetry and imprisoned and tortured him for his political activism. He has published eight books of poetry and his work has been widely translated. He has also translated works by a number of leading Australian & Aboriginal poets into Spanish, including five Aboriginal poets for the anthology Espejo de Tierra/ Earth Mirror (2008). With Steve Brock and Sergio Holas, Garrido-Salgado also translated into English the Trilingual Mapuche Poetry Anthology. The book When I was Clandestine was part of a poetical tour at the Granada International Poetry Festival in Nicaragua, Mexico and Cuba (La Habana City) in 2019
