We all know Begoña Hernández Batista in Lanzarote for her plastic work, for her paintings where she has shown the landscapes of the island, the volcanoes with all their lyrical potential, but until now few knew her in her facet as a poet.
Begoña Hernández Batista was born in Los Silos, in the north of Tenerife, and spent her childhood in the town of Arafo, the town of music. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of La Laguna and continued her academic training in Madrid, where she lived for several years. In 2000 she took up residence in Lanzarote and currently combines teaching with painting, having held numerous individual exhibitions and participated in collective exhibitions with her pictorial work.
These small initial biographical notes are relevant not only to briefly know the author's life trajectory, but also to understand some of the references we will find in her poetic work. Begoña Hernández Batista had always channeled her inspiration, her work towards painting, although parallel and silently from a very young age she had been developing a poetic work that has been growing over the years and remained unpublished until now.
The poems included in the recent publication El tiempo en los bolsillos (Editorial Escritura entre las nubes, 2023) are, therefore, the distillate of what has been produced throughout a lifetime, but revised from maturity. Therefore, we find a resounding and elegant voice that casts a personal look at the world around her and surprises us with her findings, typical of a great reader who has assimilated what she has read with avidity, because as the Galician poet Luisa Castro points out in the prologue to her collected poetry La Fortaleza, to write verses you have to: "assume as your own what others have inoculated in you, turn it into something that can sound new".
Begoña Hernández Batista achieves these creative objectives in several aspects. Firstly, I would highlight the language, apparently austere and simple, but in which there is actually an effort to select the appropriate words. The author lives in the language, as the Canarian critic Jorge Rodríguez Padrón would say, because she tries to give each word new meanings and resonances. Regarding the formal aspect of her poems, the verses are predominantly vertical and the use of very short verses stands out. I would also highlight the powerful color and musicality that are present in her poems with constant allusions. Another aspect that should be highlighted is the beauty of her metaphors and finally the way in which she finds a balance between the weight of traditions, the memories of origin with the freedom of dreams, that is, the weighting between the girl she was and the woman she is, between the pain of what was lost and the satisfaction of what has been achieved to this day.
From the past, the memories of the girl she was in a southern midlands town like Arafo, Begoña Hernández Batista builds her own world, her own island. She builds from memory, from a world that no longer exists: a rural and pleasant world of ditches, orchards and houses with patios and vines.
Begoña Hernández Batista paints time in her poems. She uses a whole range of blues to describe time. In that time she discovers the advance of silence, of loneliness that is long, but she faces it by disrupting the threads of the everyday and trying to decipher the enigmas behind apparently simple things.
In her poems she flies over the voids, mainly the void of the island and its mystery. The afternoons widen with the air of melancholy, with the discovery of one's own fragility. The author needs to do something to keep herself safe. To be able to continue living it is necessary to keep the memories in the storage room of memory. Write.
Begoña keeps time in her pockets, she keeps a starry night... But to feel safe she has, in the warm afternoons of the island, the smell of guava, the memory of childhood as a sweet lump of sugar, the trade wind with its humidity that refreshes today's flowers. For the author, writing is the search for a safe haven. That is why in her poems she revolves again and again on herself.
In the words of the Canarian poet Eugenio Padorno "a poem also has a lot of artistic object". The poems that Begoña Hernández Batista offers us are undoubtedly so and, by analogy, each poem would be like one of the paintings that make up a great exhibition that is, ultimately, this book.
