EL LIBRO DE LOS CABALLITOS
Author – Caleta Olivia, 2021
A mother, a father, three siblings, the countryside. In El libro de los caballitos, the plains are the space where language fights a battle between the possibility of naming and the silence of the wild. Valeria Meiller writes like a seamstress and a pianist. With every chord she strikes, with each vibration, she makes sounds and images reverberate; shapes that, upon unfolding, show the trace left by the folds, the stitching without thread, the scars. Objects multiply and disappear behind the world: the dangerous brightness of a knife, the saddle of a horse, the fire that destroys and originates, the presence of the children that dilute like ghosts at the gaze of adults. The poetry of Valeria Meiller speaks the language of dreams and of childhood, inscribes itself in the “ferocity of things said” to reclaim—in good faith—an inheritance.
Virginia Cosin
EL MES RARO
Author – Dakota Editora, 2015
We expect poetry to name the world for the first time. The countryside, the successive generations that dwell and work in it, simultaneously live in Valeria Meiller’s poetry, nurtured by the serene acceptance of what it means to cohabit with nature: the watering troughs where unwanted litter are drowned, rabbits whose necks are broken to peel them afterwards as an act of love, an ubiquitous 22 long rifle, cartridges and pellets. I don’t know any other pastoral that, in its exalted and daily lyricism, responds better to Rilke’s intuition: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure.”
Edgardo Cozarinsky
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