Five years ago, the coronavirus pandemic arrived to disrupt our lives, and Ediciones Remotas has had the good sense to publish the latest collection of poems by Alexis de la Cruz Otero, 'Pandemia a corazón abierto' (Pandemic with an Open Heart), a kind of diary in verse about the first two and a half months of confinement (March-May 2020) until Lanzarote decreed the transition to Phase 1 of de-escalation.
Alexis de la Cruz studied Philosophy at the University of La Laguna and in 2015 published his first book of poetry, 'Eclipse de Girasol' (Sunflower Eclipse), which is currently difficult to obtain and should be republished. He has also collaborated in publications about the writers Leandro Perdomo and Benito Pérez Armas, but he is known, especially, for running the second-hand bookstore La Madriguera, at 6 Porlier Street in Arrecife.
We follow the white rabbit. A young man opens the green doors of his burrow, his bookstore. He dusts the books on the shelves. He takes out the tin box with the Canary Island books and the trunk and the fruit boxes full of discounted stories and novels. That is his routine. But Alexis de la Cruz is much more than a bookseller. He is one of the most astute readers I know. Similarly, La Madriguera is much more than a second-hand bookstore. It is a place to encounter literature and good conversation. You should never go there looking for any book; you must let them find you or follow Alexis's appropriate recommendations. Novalis said, in one of the many cultured references in 'Pandemia a corazón abierto', that the world must be romanticized. That is what our bookseller does with La Madriguera on one of the most novel streets of Arrecife: making our city more beautiful and demonstrating that books are a first necessity - and not only in a pandemic-.
It all begins with a trip not taken to Japan. With an allusion to the Ides of March. With references to Camus's 'The Plague' and, above all, to the concerns of a person who must live with the uncertain and the terrible. Thus begins 'Pandemia a corazón abierto', where Alexis de la Cruz makes a notable literary effort and an exercise in nakedness, in stripping away. Love and the virus. Inspiration is still a virus. All the concerns that arose those days, those months until we entered Phase 1 and he could open his bookstore again are addressed, in some way, in this book that begins with a clean, refined verse and grows and stretches, trapping the reader.
Poetry, as Jean Genet suggested, is a vision of the world that is obtained with effort, sometimes exhausting, of the will tense as a flying buttress. Poetry is voluntary. It is not a softness, a free and gratuitous entry through the senses; it is not confused with sensuality, but, opposing it, is born from the most everyday places that have become strange. What is stranger than a pandemic that we never imagined disturbing the mood, altering routines, disrupting the vision of the friendly place in which we live?
Jean Genet also said that every event in our life is no more important than the resonance it has had in us. The coronavirus pandemic will be a memory -although the passage of time lightens the memory- that will accompany us for the rest of our lives to those who lived it, and when reading this collection of poems we will remember many details or it will evoke in us some of the difficult moments of that time. The confinement. The anxiety. The entertainment for so many hours in the house. The unsettling news. The small moments of freedom: the walks with the dogs (the unforgettable Duna in the case of Alexis) through a solitary Arrecife and described, especially in the case of the Charco de San Ginés and its boats, in a very beautiful way.
One of the aspects that I have found most interesting in reading this book is that Alexis de la Cruz contributes in his own lesson on poetry: The true essence of poetry does not reside / in looking at the Moon, but in knowing how to see its hidden face./ Only then is it possible to decipher the mystery. He continues: To write a poem is to translate nature./ And that is the poet: a translator of nature. As long as the words do not excite, they will not be poetry. Graceful / Spontaneous / Free of impurities / The more devoid it is of literary figures / the more refined the language will be. And more powerful. / simple, direct to the heart of people. (4/4/2020)
That's right. Alexis's verses excite, they go straight to the heart in their apparent simplicity and stir something inside. His personal confessions through poems that explain themselves will probably evoke our own memories.
Perhaps it is too simple to summarize an aesthetic ideology by saying that poetry explains itself, but it can also be dangerous to accept that poetry is explained to us by others according to particular interpretive theories... As Luis Alemany, recently deceased, explains through the character of Carlos de Los Puercos de Circe in a supposed article for the newspaper La Tarde. But in this book that ideal seems to be confirmed.
Alexis de la Cruz, our bookseller-poet, finds during the pandemic a moment to write, for reflection, remembrance and recounting of losses. The silence of the dead forces us to invent answers, as the Canadian poet Anne Carson suggests in her book Nox, which she dedicates to the death of her brother. That is what Alexis does in a way, seeking answers to an absence that has marked him since childhood. What makes us more human is our ability to live with the dead, Cristina Rivera Garza points out, alluding to John Berger in her unforgettable Autobiografía del algodón (Autobiography of Cotton). How did we manage to live those months with the uncertainty of illness and the proximity of death? Death flies over the entire collection of poems as a substrate on which to develop our lives.
In short, Alexis de la Cruz offers us a testimony of a time, but also a political, environmental, poetic... In a defense of poetry as a salvation from boredom, from the risk and uncertainty that always implies living.