The Dignity of Lives Deemed Incidental
One of thepoet’s most powerful poetic devices is precisely this sudden shift of perspective. He begins with an entirely ordinary situation—someone making shoes, repairing cars, cutting trees, nursing the dying, delivering letters—and almost imperceptibly opens the scene toward finitude. Behind the concrete gesture, Thanatos or Hades suddenly appears. The smallest acts of daily life acquire a metaphysical horizon.
Death, in this volume, is not an extraordinary event. On the contrary, it is the only character certain to arrive.
Sometimes it enters under the name of Hades, sometimes Thanatos, but always with the same infallible certainty. Gladys, the waitress, at sixty-three already wonders whether she will be alone at the moment of her final breath; she has served for decades with a smile in a highway diner until she has almost become part of the furniture. The question is simple and merciless: who will remember her?
Thomas, the retired garbage collector, now lives in an old people’s home and fears that one day he himself will be “discarded” like the objects he collected throughout his life. In one of the volume’s most grotesque images, Thanatos becomes humanity’s final garbage collector, the infallible cleaner who removes us all from the earth.
Yet this cruelty is not inhumane. Behind the poet’s grotesqueness lies compassion.
His poetry can afford to be harsh because it takes human life seriously.
Suzan, the nurse in Palliative Care, has witnessed the dying of hundreds of people. She knows the physical truth of the final moments: pale and translucent skin, rasping breath, dried lips, the slowing heartbeat. There is no romantic haze. Death is also a physiological event. And precisely this unsentimental concreteness gives dignity to what we witness. Someone remains beside another human being when that person’s presence on earth comes to an end.
Another central theme of the volume is work.
Libros Libertad 