Adverse Winds is a collection of essays, aphorisms, maxims and observations, some quasi-autobiographical, published by Huidobro in Santiago in 1926, after his return from many years in Europe.

At this distance in time it is perhaps difficult to grasp that this noisy, wealthy and entitled poet, who had cut something of a swathe through literary Paris – was almost unknown back home in Santiago. He had published nothing there apart from self-financed volumes of juvenilia before his departure for Paris in 1916, and his new avant-garde work from the Paris period was strange territory for provincial, behind-the-times Santiago.

Needing to attract some attention upon his return, Huidobro assembled this collection as an introduction to the serious new self that he wished to present to those who might have heard a few rumours of his successes abroad. The break-up of his marriage shortly afterwards, and the surrounding scandal, were to ruin his attempts in this direction, and cause his rapid return to Europe, this time sans famille and pursued by death-threats from irate relatives of his new young paramour. Looked at objectively, the book is a grab-bag, including some fascinating and oft-quoted statements (the poet is a little god; I will be the premier poet of my time, etc.), alongside a number of sideswipes at writers he wished to denigrate, and even dismissals of some he had once regarded as friends. His excursions – daring for their time – into matters of love, sex and infidelity in the maxims and aphorisms must have struck many after the scandal as being, at the very least, misguided. The book should be seen as a pendant to the previous year’s collection of Manifestos (also available in this series).