Or what we are is brevity and dream, / hummingbird, flower and flight forever? Juliet Doubles
The book of poems Outside the Album of the poet Julieta Dobles IzaguirreEditorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia EUNED, San José, Costa Rica, 2005 impregnates us with a poetic prose of philosophical reflections with clear images built on Literary Portraits: look deep, mature, at a present that makes us travel through its stages of life: girl, young woman, professional adult in various roles: daughter, granddaughter, mother, poet, grandmother in continuous rebirths; of a lyrical, epic, philosophical force (What seems to us today / excessive breath, / Will it weigh twenty-one and a half grams tomorrow? / Or are we in a kingdom that does not belong to us, / finally foreigners in matter / mutable, but eternal,/deaf, but fertile? (Hummingbird’s questions), and so we continue from moment to moment in constant vigil to the common dream…
Part with a photographic eye, captures internal lights and shadows, parks, forests; scans the family home, noises and whispers of a kettle in the kitchen awaken blues and greens, a ”defenseless forest”, ”because the souls of the parks/have the temper of a tree,/like those of the forests,/and no less haughty and daring. Name the park of the West of Madrid” it is a blow of dawn breeze/ full face, and in Paris ´´the fir and the cedar shudder” ”we saw fleeting where the earth becomes blood” ”vertigo we he wins and the amazement is turned on”, and Versailles, the forests of Rambouillet…almost the entire book breathes nature and familiar feelings.
It provokes me to start from the water element, nebulous soul, amniotic water with the poem Under the Water (dedicated to his father), to the breath of the origin, in seminal waters, millions of spermatozoa look for the wet ovum (…) might it be that his resounding transparency/takes us back to the origin? (…) and the water repeats its claims/beneath all terrestrial vocation/until exhaustion and astonishment?/ that we have a thousand lives/struggling to get out./ And a multitude of beings/claim on us/their voice or their silences/ . Sacred waters on earth and an oval body in pregnancy augur the mystery of the vital principle.
The poet has spent a lifetime writing to her beloved land ”natal and mine, because time/has not touched your nights and your parks/in my dream/- page. 41-and returns to the Motherland, recovers his childhood, that unknown territory, of newborn rivers in springs, and torrents grow calmly to shoot time in unique, sonorous, eternal flashes, flashbacks in Literary Portraits, with a masterful style, bittersweet memory exercise ”playing to rescue my childhood/next to the sleepwalking lake of the sleeping ducks,/where I can throw crumbs to the moon/ and float in circles without time /above all sadness -p. 40-
As the poet says Rainer Maria Rilke ”The Homeland is childhood”, she goes, what is that house tree eternalized/by its images in the childhood home,/captures my memory and obsesses it/as a common place? It is a cry before life, its disappearance and that tree is still inside, it is beating, it is presence, childhood life ”and there my childhood sings,/ powerful claim that does not want to die/ (…) In this patio,/ fenced off today by death,/ returns to being the same as always, mirror of presences/ and disrupted games and ruined caresses/. She then arms herself with the poetic eye and stops time, with portraits of fears, loves, existential concerns, obsessions; she always goes back to childhood, with that poetic instinct she hugs the trees, little birds…, experiences flash that graphic to the rhythm of the years lived, she zooms in and nothing stops her from being able to know, recognize herself” “that the unspeakable come out to the light is a political issue”, says the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, and with individual strength” … “my ferocious soul, flooded with birds universalizes its melancholy, pains of excluded women, of invisible writers, of grandmothers and relatives” “two suns that smile/ at the restless corners of my life” , with that reflective skill of his chronological time, transcends and immerses us when seeing and reversing in the others with feelings and emotions that connect the reader that resonate from beginning to end to the dispossession, its leaves fly to the dream of the hummingbird; She is a poet who lives intensely, explores her being with words and images, introspective and transpersonal on the edge of her encounter, metamorphoses the soul of a woman poet, who knows well the oppression of her grandmother, mother, and rises to break the silence.
The eternal question in the face of our dissolution, tear imposes a “mirror of presence” of help and restlessness goes to the lap of “my grandmother in her distant presence of a bell, / back in my childhood tinged with aromatic books / and recovered Santa Lucías ,/my grandmother, beautiful accomplice/of my most secret uprisings,/and my granddaughter in her clear proximity without pretexts/pretexts/where we weave new words,/and old and festive irreverences,/like love” – (The Question) and so we go in eternal extensions of lives with common feelings and individual feelings, who can forget the grandmother and mother? (”I am the part of you that remains/in this truce of life,/short summer that stretches,/coils, and crouches brilliantly/between the darkness of yesterday and tomorrow/ that stalk me/ – Stalking- and that absence that marches in the moans of trains is kept inside.The imprint of grandmother Soledad “the perpetual officiant” persists, who despite forbidding her education -like the majority-, they remained, witches with their stories and, we are the granddaughters of the matriarchs, inventing days and nights as Sherezade, and we continue in resistance. An infinite service still continues and humor always saves us, the game “to laugh, to laugh with open eyes/in his garden of quicksilver lilies”.(The perpetual Officiant)
Astonishment slept for seventy years in his mother’s ”unpublished poems” ”condemned to silence”, her poems ”silent eroticism,/vigor riding fierce,/anguishing blinks” ”never once more silence./ I swear by your secrecy/of years and miracles./and by the rare artery/of instinct and poetry/that still communicates to us/beyond your death,/sister, more than mother,/in words.
The maternal figures structure the force of the psychic nature until the growth of early childhood and their company to maturity comforts us when pronouncing “mama”, and the death of a mother generates a lot of pain, and elevates the human being to a new renaissance, -I remember lonely beings, poets who lost it when they were young and they became conch in their solitude and some who felt their last breath and death in their arms, urged them to change. The emotional umbilical cut, the detachment, marks a new birth, to a wise and compassionate maturity ”while there was the mother, life was sustained,/ and the stopped air/ protected the memories and voices,/ untouched songs of a yesterday that beat/the mother left, and weeks later/time has raided my house, victorious./And the most fluffy tree, king of the patio,/the one from which the followingnoon rises,/languishes in parasites and nobody.(Oblivion Gate)
How can I not feel that eternal photo that throbs in me and I just sob, like an absorbed girl, I think regarding going to look for my mother and love her, in her smelly chair from dad who left a year ago,”today you have been staying/intoxicated with I dream in the blue chair,/ blue like the dreams we lose,/ they bleat- creating your forehead, full of fixed stars/. We believe we are immortal and we almost never think regarding physical disappearance and we avoid caressing – perhaps the pandemic made us more sensitive to hugging, telling them that we love them- I remember that my grandmothers- Fortunatta and Celedonnia- never allowed us to go to bed without kissing ”nobody knows if you are going to wake up…” the poet guides us: ”we always believe that there is time/for our most beloved elderly,/time to listen and caress. –Portrait of my elderly mother–
The poet’s house breathes “the house that lived with us for half a century” with worlds and things waiting to be discovered, it is the house of childhood that throbs inside and travels slowly snailing leaving traces, losses, transformations, invisible underworlds that are awakened by touch and it is the wind of time detained in scabs on the verge; pulling their bark bleeds us and flowing, flowing at rest and she is in the Closed House, challenging time, oblivion “the kingdom of absence:/ this is the true window of death,/ that crystallizes everything lived/ in an urn impossible to returns. (…) that I only have this poem left / where I converse alone with absence, / in front of that patio of ours, / where the old trees / planted by the paternal hand / – do you remember them in their curtain of abandonment – / they they die on us too.
In pariah and migrant company, nothing ties us or perhaps eyes that meet for the first time and we burn with desires with the river that bathes us and the tree eroticizes each transit and we continue or stop to drink more sand and we go to the childhood that gave us revive, beings wrapped in saddlebags, we go without weight, in a sea shell, a garden snail, turtles and suddenly a howl grows, a drum of entrails We are, what is it to be a woman, girl, mother, poet, daughter, lover all in a breath? Fly the Poet’s Equestrian Turtle Cesar Moro with moons in your eyes…
Inaccessible unknown territories continue and early childhood is a fundamental pillar to get out of attachment, and love, get out of oneself, recreate; perhaps the game will open up other heartbeats for us, yes, it will discover selves, interactions of the Us, to rethink ourselves and to write from the experience of women and to be treated as human beings and citizens. This century belongs to us. How long does eternity last or that touch of skin or lips? We are in the flight of the butterflies of the spirits of the goldfinches…”My last doll!/ With which I said goodbye without knowing it/ to my plenary and protected childhood,/ where happiness did not ask questions” and ” Another woman emerges from these last years,/dusty, salty in so many tears./And she takes you once more by the hand/following greenery, children, loves, agonies./Another one who suddenly wants to break ships, /seas and disloyalties/ with her word, with her skin, with everything/Scratch this steppe of open solitude,/to return to bite hidden moorings,/to stop this train that is bringing her closer/to consummation,/because she still desires, and trembles, and is alive,/ hugging an old doll with no return/…
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