Daniela Martín Hidalgo is for me a reference and an author that I admire since I read some of her poems a few years ago. She is one of the great poets of her generation, one of the most valuable writers that Lanzarote has contributed to the poetic scene in recent years, and recently, she has offered us a new sample of her rigorous work with La piel, la pulpa, el gusano, la semilla published by the prestigious Pre-Textos publishing house.
In the last twenty years, Martín Hidalgo has published five books: Memorial para una casa (2003), La ciudad circular (2003), Arúspice (2014), Pronóstico del tiempo (2015) and the aforementioned La piel, la pulpa, el gusano, la semilla. She is, as we can see, a long-distance author, with a strong awareness of her own poetic work and meticulous work with language.
At the time, she already stood out for her precocious literary maturity. We must bear in mind that her first two books were published when the author had barely passed her twenties. However, some of the high qualities of her poetry were present very early on and have remained: the serenity and elegiac tone that is perceived in Memorial para una casa and in La Ciudad Circular where the inspiration of the readings of the classics is present even explicitly as reflected in the quotes that accompany the poems of this last book, all from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.
Another characteristic present in her poetry since then is that it is impregnated with that beauty, that strangeness, that wonder that every great reading should produce as the critic Harold Bloom pointed out in his work The Western Canon.
The careful language used by the author and the readings offered by her poems, the different layers of reading show a great command of the poetic material. And finally we find the resource of memory, with a whole repertoire of real and imaginary places of the author transmuted into lasting poetic images that she shares with her readers.
Daniela Martín Hidalgo builds the imperishable of memory from the apparently fragile, the provisional, the perishable: experiences, sensations that give an impression of immediacy, of having occurred in a recent -although permanent- time, but which, however, enriches with the evocation sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter of what has been lived, of one's own history, of desire. All these characteristics mentioned and present from her first publication to La piel, la pulpa, el gusano y la semilla give the whole of her work an undoubted aesthetic coherence.
The same goes for the theme. As for the author's concerns, decadences and uncertainties predominate, where are they taking us? The environmental sustains an inner solitude. Persistent. Then there is the question of the family. Her condition as a daughter, granddaughter or sister is constantly present. It is a starting point. The house, a domestic, interior space. Then the travels, the movement, the uprooting, the journey: life. Or the vicinity of life. The digestion of life. The change, the transformation of things, it seems to me that this is the author's real obsession. And the definitive form of change: death, a theme that flies over all her books. An anticipation of death, an almost physical pain, the need to die. The experience of death. Death inseparable from life. The abandoned. The lost. Is the only thing we end up knowing loss? What does loss teach us?
From a symbolic point of view, as has already been pointed out, death not only means the end but also a regeneration. In this sense, Nietzsche defined the realization of a work as the desire to be in another part, in another time and place of one's own and a time and a place of one's own is what Daniela Martín Hidalgo meticulously builds in each of her books beyond that partial or definitive transformation. To rescue them from oblivion, from death? Let's see as an example of the above a poem from her first book Memorial para una casa:
To inhabit
WE NEVER INHABITED the house.
To inhabit it would have been
To close the door and the windows,
To ignore the escape,
Horizontal boards for a long resistance.
To wait for the ruin
With the flesh cleft in the walls.
Then to remain immobile
Waiting for nothing
To carry an echo of word
And in that place
The earth would drown with its own silence.
Since she had the possibility of abandoning her original place, always present even in absence, Lanzarote, the life of Daniela Martín Hidalgo has passed far from the island: between the Netherlands and Madrid.
Movement, change, transformation are constant in her life and work. Her concern for the passage of time. On this occasion she wants to delve deeper into this issue. And she invites us to do so, to explore new areas of the depth of her poetic world in La piel, la pulpa, el gusano, la semilla.
Daniela Martín Hidalgo's way of investigating different aspects of daily life, of observing domestic details, apparently unimportant anecdotes from which she reaches introspection and invites us to reflection reaches new heights in this latest poetic installment. In this way we are invited to discover, to accompany the author in her particular findings, in the same way that the tide delivers us on some beaches of Lanzarote certain jallos making use of a beautiful metaphor as shown in a poem from her latest book:
Jallos
Sometimes findings, small joys.
Having a dog.
«Desires exist before
than people».
Sometimes, making him smile.
Metal, accumulated jars, matters
on days that cannot be saved.
I sink the spoon into the soft broth.
A reverberation rises that rises
from the ripe fruit,
down the sidewalk friends laugh.
The title can guide us in that journey of recognition, in the discovery of the findings that Martín Hidalgo proposes. The author has started from the ideal, from the fruit. If we look in Cirlot's dictionary of symbols for its meaning we will find an allusion to earthly desires. It seems to me that in more than in any previous book Daniela Martín Hidalgo gives herself to look for them. But the symbol also comes from within. It goes beyond the skin, the outer layer that covers, the most superficial, the appearance, the form that things take, what covers the pulp, the flesh, the perishable. The worm appears as an interference in the purity of the fruit. It is as Chevalier points out “a symbol of transition from earth to light, from death to life”. And in the seed we find the potential of the whole being.
The title is actually nothing more than a summary of the powerful symbolism that we could find delving into the verses of the author, from the outside to the inside, from the anecdotal to the profound. In the same way that the poet Olvido García Valdés in her book Del ojo al hueso, where she alludes to the itinerary between the sight, the apparent, what the senses of the physical world can capture until its processing in the bone, the solid, what sustains the interior- Martín Hidalgo offers us a journey, a transition towards the depth, the deepest of us.
If we consider each book as a stretch of life, as the aforementioned García Valdés has written, in the case of the work of Daniela Martín Hidalgo this seems to be fulfilled offering us a new stage of this reconverted into poetic material. In La piel, la pulpa, el gusano, la semilla she seems to reach the full maturity of her craft, of so many years of dedicated work. We should not waste the opportunity to inhabit the poetic territory that she presents in this book whose verses remain in the memory as woods found on a wild beach, as seeds in an old barn, as the unforgettable and sweet taste of ripe fruits found in a fig tree lost near Timanfaya.