A VISIONARY elegy, INRI gives voice to the thousands of “disappeared” in the 1970s and, as such, it is an important and arresting work of poetry.

Profoundly moving, it pans across the beautiful landscapes of the country, from its endless coasts and beaches, its snow-covered cordilleras and fields of wildflowers to the vast Atacama desert and the Pacific ocean beyond.

These places are where bodies were thrown from planes and helicopters during the horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship and in the section entitled The Desert, the landscape turns into a massive cemetery, where the voiceless are finally heard: “They cry out, the Chilean desert cries out. No-one would say this could be, but they cry out,” Zurita writes.

It’s a place where widows and mothers of the disappeared go in search of their loved ones, trying to find a little bone, a mere remnant of those who have perished there and whose bodies still remain unfound and some of those voiceless have names in this epic narrative: “Bruno is a little black claw. Susana is a little black claw. The daisies bend screeching. Here are the daisies, the gauze snow on the mountains. The line of surf. I weep for a country that is my enemy.”

As the book’s translator William Rowe writes: “This poem does not offer redemption, the wound to our common human existence persists, the disappeared dead are still dead.” Instead, it offers a stark mirror onto Chile’s past atrocities through the country’s barren and quasi-mystical landscape.

It’s certainly one of the most compelling books of poetry ever written in Latin America and a great prophetic poem of this new century.

INRI is published by New York Review of Books, price £9.99.