EL RECREO

Author – El fin de la noche, 2010

Against what the title suggests, El Recreo is a poetry book about making, about the actions required to create a core that resists the weather. It is a song to the secret life of settlers… “They have to plant shadows for so much whiteness.” It is a text that measures, lists, attempts to name. The best and the worst that happens to the land is the water. The water lays out a delicate balance. When too little, there is a draught. When too much, there is a flood. “With water everywhere, the family on the roof.” The breakdown of balance makes life unsuitable, but though everything can dry under the sun, or sink under the water, it is only in people where that manifests as a dissolution. “This morning, the father climbed the tree with the girl around his neck.” El recreo is traversed by almost biblical figures, proposing a particular genesis where those who create are also those whom life threatened, almost as if paradise didn’t exist, almost as if the only thing possible was a space of permanent tension. Only Valeria knows what is the secret of her break; if when she is out of it or in it.

Martín Rodríguez