Holguin-based La Luz editions
In the most recent Book Saturday, which usually takes place around the Palacio del Segundo Cabo in Old Havana, the presence of one of the most prestigious publishing houses in Cuba in terms of talent and work, was the protagonist in the shadow of a handful of its titles, the hallmark of a constancy that enriches the insular map of good reading: the Holguin-based La Luz editions. Among those, the volume Las piedras clamarán (The Stones Will Cry) has once again left its mark, with praise and distinction.
The enjoyment that a compilation offers, especially when it comes to poetry, always corresponds to the author or authors of the texts gathered therein, and in the case of the latter, to the coordinates of the theme. From the first one, made in ancient Greece by Meleager of Gadara – “a garland of flowers”, as he himself defined it, and later the Latin equivalent, “florilegium”-, to our days, a work of such quality opens up to new perspectives, with greater or lesser certainties and contributions at the time of its reading.
Holguin-based La Luz editions
In such an order, finding a Cuban repertoire that is very remarkable in its promise, and diverse in authors that make up a summary of verbal endeavors as splendid as it is punctual, of a finished formal zeal and a human fabric that goes beyond its thematic frontier, is an event. Las piedras clamarán, poesía cubana contemporánea de temas LGBT+, selection by Jesús J. Barquet and Virgilio López Lemus, is placed among the great poetic compilations of Cuban literature.
“Poetry is a bet on truth, which is not the same as venting or sincerity; truth must be expressed literarily so that it moves the reader and persuades him,” Spanish poet Luis Garcia Montero has once warned, and such assertion is more than evident throughout the 342 pages of this splendid poetic sampler, compiled with care and dedication by two authors who have not only considered the quality of each text, but also the elegant framework of the whole.
Holguin-based La Luz editions
Setenta y dos poetas conform this sum: two already deceased, Alberto Acosta Perez and Alina Galliano, In memoriam, opening that has the volume; and with the subtitle of Mosaic, the other seventy, residents in Cuba, United States of America, Spain, France, Mexico and Brazil; a set that gathers names that begin their journey, others in progression of work, and several very recognized, sort of ogival arch that well distinguishes a verbal architecture as sensitive as fair.
In the prologue, Barquet and Lopez Lemus specify what has been the guide with which they have carried out such an endeavor: “This mosaic does not pretend to be an anthology or a panorama, but a survey unveiled on contemporary Cuban poems that present, in a more or less evident way in the text itself, the numerous intimate, familiar, social and cultural themes related to the lived experience of the LGBT+ community and individuals both in Cuba and in the rest of the world”.
And to be broader, they add that “in no way is this a collection of authors with such personal orientations or conditions: it is a collection of texts whose lyrical subjects are open to the obvious expression of such themes, which include both the erotic-affective and other general aspects of human life and society. We were pleased to see that some poets not belonging to these groups expressed their solidarity with our project by sending us their poems included here”.
It is true -as Barquet and Lopez Lemus warn- that “without wanting to make literary history in this regard and limiting ourselves to the literary genre that concerns us, there have been in Cuban poetry before 1980 -beginning of a decade in which LGBT+ issues began to be treated with greater frequency and explicitness both inside and outside Cuba- several poems that refer to these issues…”. Regino Boti, José Manuel Poveda, Emilio Ballagas, Virgilio Piñera and Reinaldo Arenas, among others, are among them.
Holguin-based La Luz editions
The plurality and the wealth of proposals that open up at the time of the text and its elaboration, to discover the signs of lives and accounts in favor of the already pointed out truth referred to literarily, are emphasized in the poems that this book gathers. The literal suggestions, more or less explicit but always fixed in the natural course of the poem and its revelations, incite to a memory exercise as moving as reasonable, a succession of images that connect works and times of varied origin.
There are many references to various cultures that the poets make their own: the antiquities of Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome and Byzantium are revisited; there are moments with Catullus, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Shakespeare, Rimbaud; characters from Stendhal and Virginia Woolf alternate with men and women who move through any time; in addition, visions of cinema are used, from Garbo and Valentino in the days of silent movies, to Pasolini’s Teorema or Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
Not infrequently in these texts, the yesterday of the bodies transmuted into the today of the poem that recovers them, traces a map of affinities and translations as lively as it is captivating. The scenarios of the intimate and the public, whether in a metropolis or in a hamlet, acquire similar gifts of unequivocal grandeur, summit and abyss of feelings that overflow lives and destinies. Between alcoves and dens, intemperance and taverns, ardors and misgivings, shouts and whispers, the poems in this book are a luminous wager on truth.
With cover and interior images by Zaida del Río, who splendidly captures the breath of the book, Las piedras clamarán -titled after St. Luke (19:40) in the New Testament: “I tell you that if these are silent, /the stones will cry out”- has been a major cultural event. “Life, light and truth, such a triple flame / produces the inner infinite flame”, Rubén Darío notified back in 1904 in his famous Prelude. This book has made such a statement possible: congratulations to the stones in La Luz.
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