Teresa Cabrera’s “Las Ages”: Luces’s Critique of the New from the Bakterial Universe Album

The sure balance between the stark and the serene, the abstract and the material, the lucidity and the shadow sustains “Las Ages”, the book that Teresa Cabrera has just published. In his first collection of poems, “Sueño de pez o neblina” (2010), he handled an onirism that blurred panoramas, buildings and faces of a city made up of moods whose nuances denounced and warned of an unjust reality in “that before you the dogs / evil out there ”. This time the dream is an open door to an inner universe corroded by negative signs that mark an incessant conflict with moments full of outbursts and sensory and verbal fires.

This deflagration, mute in certain sections, eloquent in others, allows us to glimpse a world decomposed -humanly, historically- by a power that is embodied here in pernicious elements repeated from poem to poem. The first is gold and its deceptive glow, a dynamic symbol of greed and destruction, manifested through an apocalyptic imagery (“Gold spits out a giant wave of fire // with the shock wave the head is thrown away / a its passage the wind whips the doors bristling the animals / the wires are stretched towards the sky / the fire is a black star ”), heralding men the confusion and horror (“ you will see that brightness lodges in your head / the wheel gets stuck in the mud / and the nightmare begins as soon as someone throws a coin on the road ”.

The second persistent element is the machine, a devouring device whose resolute criticism at times recalls Pound’s song against usury (“while the machine dumps its goods, it starts wars / punctures pipes, tank tunnels / steals weight in the market, it adulterates gasoline and grinds the pills between two spoons ”) and by others brings to mind that affirmation of Marx that“ the constant improvement of the machine places the worker in a more precarious situation ”and that in the long run he would cause his own annihilation. The poem “Stagnant water is easy to interpret” seems to support this assertion: “the star put messages in my mind / so that my mind explodes / and its particles embody machines of the most recent model / if it does not explode, its flare is useless. ruin / ruin repeated the bubble / if it doesn’t burst there is nothing to hope for ”.

A different plane of the book is presented in his last poems, much more emotional and close to the circumstances of the poetic speaker: the chronicle of an incursion through the labyrinth of public health, furnished with suffering bodies, marked by the indifference of those corridors under whose only natural light “bacteria are accommodated” and where blood and platelets are “merchandise”. Cabrera’s sentimental restraint manages to capture personal helplessness with admirable objectivity and thus make it a common offering and general testimony of the bureaucratic coldness in the face of devastating death: “soon I will be left without a father / or all that remains to be known about the father is contained in the sample (…) this is how the State will respond: a certificate with blades / no voice without meat ”. These motifs are reminiscent of some poems from the important “No one burns the world” by Victoria Guerrero, which cover similar issues.

In this aspect we find the poem that collects the happiest expression of Cabrera in his three books published so far: “The machine throws the machinist”. The enunciative ease, the conceptual synthesis and the striking originality of the images in this text are conspicuously conspired to illustrate an extreme situation in which nothing can be granted: “the machine produces and gleams in the calm of a dawn open to all possibilities / the speech is the dead / the delivery of your body to the State / the curtain the oven the machine that silences the roar of a final fire ”. And although other pieces gathered in “The Ages” do not manage to round off their tasks with such vigor, we are facing a stimulating book that stands out among the latest Peruvian poetry, where -the evidence is already abundant- the voice of women is the one that guides the pattern.

The token

Teresa Cabrera. The ages.

AUB, 2021. 66 pp.

Relationship with the author: acquaintances.

Qualification

3.5 Stars out of 5

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