“Clouds inside”, the portico of El camino a casa (Selvi Ediciones, 2020), by Caridad Atencio, refers to the fragmentary condition of poetry based, in addition, on an author’s reviews of her own work. Likewise, “Clouds …” is presented as a kind of poetics that, in a just frame by choice, is installed to refer to some reaches of poetry, while connecting with the entire book. Due to this state of a prologal piece, Atencio writes: “Poetry hides the half that it wants to deliver. In that struggle, she amazes herself and begins the journey again, the outbreak. To presuppose a fabric, a framework preceded by, in a certain way, moving questions is, at least, an impossible effort ”.
Through the two well-connectable sections: “Perhaps divisible” and “The way home”, the book bursts forth from its first pages like a search for confirmation. It is not the random journey, the improvisation that confuses itself, seeking constant astonishment at the events of the world. It is the fluctuation between present and past, the cultural weight and continuing to experience the day to day until finding more moderate territories or, even, with other incentives as it happens especially towards the second half of the notebook.
Now the writing is prosaic, it relies on the author’s testimonies and, although the past seems to determine the confessional, it is memory that is enthroned in a present in an indefinite rigor, transnational but specific as an evocation of the lyrical subject: “When my father died the red and tufted Pacific Ocean, which had been cut down by him in an abusive way, flourished. When I lost my mother, the tree, which barely gave flowers, fell on the path that, near the garden, provided the entrance and exit of the house ”.
The poems are allowed to be read in their exposed autonomy. However, an almost sequential force prevails that Atencio avoids from time to time with all intention so that, in retrospect, there are alternations or, rather, elliptical jumps in immediate texts, where something happens during childhood (“Llegaba el tiempo … / ”) To suddenly attend an experience in which more than love converges (“ A guy who lived a bit outside the law… / ”). Thus it influences the path and even determines it. To this is added the story about the death of his father and then one comes to know him again through an anecdote that again includes the reference to his departure. Read “And the point is that he heard her sing again … /”.
The silent father walks next to the protagonist self and the mother does not stay behind. The mother, in fact, is still evoked with provocation, which is not contempt or resentment: “Although you lamented because I was born a woman, and because of the immense pain that would come over me, to cradle me you abandoned everything, even if you were alone, very alone at home. All the time it comes back to the instant that with a stretch of fabric left over from your suit you created the prodigy of mine… / ”. Could a complaint be noticed? Absolutely. What the poem invades is a reconciliation between two too close generations.
At the end of his most recent collection of poems, halfway between the memoirs and the essay, the epilogue “Clouds outside”, which personal commitment to find in assorted opinions of the genre in question, closes with reasons of his poetics. Caridad Atencio ends up admitting: “At this point I feel that there are definitions of poetry as there are poems and there should be. That disturbing approach to the limit or insistent accumulation in pursuit of it, not the destruction of it, is what encourages my psyche and many others, making the road a universe ”.
Allow the reader then some estimating quirk.
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