There is a calm before the storm. This is what happens when a poem haunts writers: there is a strange calmness that leads to something crazy growing in the poet’s mind. There are many studies on the creative process and how artists enter altered states of consciousness to create their works. These situations are the closest thing to a storm, the two phases that produce it, the one that precedes it and the storm itself. It is creation, an explosion of emotion that is channeled and eventually turned into work for others to see. The waters that accumulate after the storm, the puddles we step on to wet ourselves, because we are that, the product, the reflection of the storm itself.
Published by Maclein y Parker publishing house, Ana Martínez Castillo’s fire and seed is her return to the powerful poetry we are used to. Ana’s poetry and narrative drink from the unusual, from the darkness, from the solidity, that darkness that poets like Baudelaire, Pizarnik, Verlaine, Plath have shown us. The first poem that opens the book already worries us: “My mother said: / You will know how to control all your impulses / / You will know how to curl like a smooth ball at night.” This is Ana at its core, a writer who clears the gut, moves to the center of emotion and anxiety.
What Martínez Castillo really tells us is the symbol, the image, and what produces it. We are here with a symbolist poet on the journey of the word, and a writer for whom what he says and how he says it is very important. This poem, which we reproduced below, may be an example of what we want to tell: «We will learn to control what burns, / grows and disobeys, round, medium, / contaminates all lines and allows / tongues, throats tighten. / We will protect the body without deciding what can be spent, / without rejecting everything that keeps you awake, static eyeballs / pupils, fixed and hysterical membranes, retinas…»
Fire and seed is, first of all, a collection of poems that we do not name but that speak of the restlessness that is there like a lurking monster. It is this monstrosity, these collective fears that we all share, that make us uneasy, worry us. Hence the two concepts of the title, fire and seed. The first is what causes us to distort the truth, and the second is what we carry within us or what we attribute to others. This is what leads to capsizing.
Fire and seed, like almost all of Ana Martínez Castillo’s work, is an atavistic journey inward. Ana guides us towards what shudders inside and shares this disappointment with us. Ana’s poetics, to define it, would be like running a fork on a plate, nails on a chalkboard, this is what constitutes her poetics. We can confirm that this is a poetry of restlessness. However, as the witness of the accident, she knows very well how to bring Ana, who continues to stare at the blood despite the cruelty of the oppression, in front of the reader. Mankind, by tradition, is restless and sickly, since ancient times we have been witnesses of beauty, but more of cruelty. For it is in the beauty of what worries us that the urge to continue observing is achieved. It is the final disaster that moves us to the path of creation. As in the closing poem of the book: «Mother said: / In disaster, you will come to nest. / You will remain calm».