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Juxtas (Back and Forth) by Mario Licón Cabrera
Launch Speech given by Peter Boyle 7 December Sydney 2007 Cervantes Publishing ISBN 9780949274205 email:info@cervantespublishing.com
Peter Boyle lives in Sydney. His most recent books are Museum of Space (UQP) and Reading Borges (Picador)
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I want to start
by thanking Mario Licón for inviting me to speak at the launch of his new book Yuxtas. Ten years ago I first had the privilege of meeting Mario. He was
living then in Little Comber Street in Paddington with Jennifer Green, Jenny who
is in many of these poems. Not long after meeting Mario I was there at the
funeral for Jenny, one of the many deaths that mark this book.
Meeting Mario
meant being taken into a new world, the world of his passionate intensity for
poetry. I had already read Lorca, Vallejo, Paz but Mario knew their work
inwardly, with an intensity and depth possible for someone who had grown up
inside Hispanic culture and inside the beautiful Spanish language. Mario’s
readings of those poets, particularly Vallejo, captured their seriousness, their
depth and resonance. As I‘ll want to show later, the rich tradition of Lorca,
Vallejo and Paz, of Hispanic poetry in general, is a strong presence in the
present collection, Yuxtas. Briefly speaking, it is a tradition that sees
poetry as above all a place of truth. In poetry “no hay mentiras,”
“there
are no lies”. “En esa mar, no se miente” – on this sea, there is no
lying. Poetry is marked above all by simplicity, by directness, by standing in a
place of truth, rather than by metaphors or embellishment. It locates the value
of poetry within the tone, the simplicity, the purity, the immense openness with
which we start, rather than the verbal dressing up of what we have to say.
Coming now to
the book itself, I would like to talk about it in two parts. Reading the
manuscript for the first time over the last few days, I saw it as falling into
two parts. The first part contains many poems I was already familiar with
− either from reading earlier drafts of them or because of their similarity to
other poems of Mario’s I had read before. They are poems of places and
landscapes, of moving between landscapes but also of moving between languages.
In them Mario gives us the blessing of letting us see our world enlarged,
enriched as two worlds are put together and the familiar realities of Australia
are seen through a double language. The second half of the book is something
else again. It was a new discovery for me, a real revelation. There you get
these wonderful poems, poem after poem, intense confronting poems of death.
One of the many
benefits of living in a multicultural country is that you have the possibility
of seeing the familiar world around you in so many ways, seeing it as perceived
through different worlds and different languages. So the first half of Mario’s
book is largely arranged by pairings of places and landscapes. The Domain is set
against Chichen Itza; Centennial Park against Chapultepec Park; Hill End is
placed beside Hermosilla City. The technique enlarges our world, shifts our
perceptions so we can see differently.
It is not only
landscapes Yuxtas travels between but also languages. To give you an idea
of how Mario glides between languages and uses the special richness of both Spanish and English, to transform the most everyday item or
experience into something glowing with beauty and strangeness, I want to read a
short poem from near the beginning of the book, “Un patio vecino/ A Backyard
Nearby”. I’ll read it in Spanish first:
Como un pájaro herido una
sombrilla
roja y rota flapea rodeada
por macetas quebradas y plantas
muertas
todas tiesas y desnudas bajo la
brillante luz seca.
Algunas sillas volteadas rodean
una mesa
cubiertas con raídas bolsas de
plástico negro.
En el tenderdero un gancho
solitario (now the English words}
clings y clangs contra un brazo
de metal.
A Backyard Nearby
surrounded by cracked pots and
dead plants,
stiff and bare under the
dry-bright light.
{what a beautiful evocation of the Australian light, the
typical
light of a summer “the dry bright light”}
Around a table, upside-down
chairs,
covered with ragged black
plastic bags.
On the clothes-hoist a lonely
cloth hanger
clangs and clings against a
metal limb {contra un brazo de
metal).a metal arm.
I want to turn
now to the wonderful moving elegies and poems of death that make up the last
part of this book. Among the powerful poems in the second half of the book three
that stand out for me are “Osario,” an elegy for the death of his father,
“Volker Shüler Will’s Funerals” and “La Muerte Agradecida,” both about the
death of his mother. These are tough powerful poems. It is not easy to write
about the death of one’s father or mother or wife. Anyone who is a writer or a
poet knows that. Such hard things in life often flatten us completely, reduce us
to silence. The tradition that sustains Mario here is one of simplicity, of
honest directness, a tone of simple truthfulness. There are poems earlier in the
book which show how this simplicity can work so strongly. An important element
in this book is the presence of Vallejo with his vision of poetry as absolute
truth, of speaking from a place where only the essential is left to be said.
This can be seen in a very short poem from earlier in the book, “I hear/I
read”:
I hear
rosellas
crying aloud.
I imagine
their bright
colours amid
the branches
shining under
the morning
sun.
I read
about a
young Mexican
bricklayer
who jumped
from the 6th floor.
Too poor
to help
his mother
and brothers.
Mario Licón identifies poetry as the force that makes it possible to stand in the presence of these fierce experiences of pain and loss and to continue. Poetry becomes a gift that enables us to be open to what surrounds us, open to those presences of our own dead and of the world. To read just a few lines from the poem “Tonight”:
Tonight I want to give thanks .
. .
To poetry for giving me a pair
of hands
with which I can greet the wind
and touch
the faces of my beloved dead
ones.
How is it possible to speak from within
this space? By cultivating a simplicity, an honesty, a humility before the
world. This is very much the legacy of the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo, a
legacy there within the poetry of Mario Licón.
I will leave it to you to read for yourselves the long poems “Osario,”
the wonderful moving prose poem “Volker Shüler-Will’s Funerals.” “La
Muertre Agradecida,” the elegy for Jenny, for his brother. One can only
imagine how difficult it must be to write of so many beloved dead ones, to be so
deeply surrounded by the dead. Mario has enriched us all through these poems. I
will finish by reading one of the shorter poems about death, a very beautiful
poem with a delightful presence of life in it, “Cancion/Song.” I’ll read
it mixing the Spanish and the English:
And how did Inez die?
Longing for love
longing for love
on her bed
on her bed.
And how did David die?
Murdered in prison
murdered in prison
by injustice
by injustice.
And how did Esperanza die?
Y como murió Esperanza?
Regando aquella flor
regando aquella flor
que tanto quería
que tanto quería
Watering that flower
watering that flower
that she loved the most
Y como murío Ilusión?
And how did Ilusion die?
Así como llegó
así como llegó
just as she arrived
just as she arrived
soñando
volando
dreaming
flying.
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