A BOOK FROM JAIL
By Fernando Rodriguez Sosa..................... (from www.Cubanow.net)
(URl:http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=7&item=691&cont=show.php)
Cubanow.- "I have often imagined young Pablo Neruda in his room at the student boarding house of 513 Maruri Street, writing his poems, while in a dark and cold cell I wrote mine and made him my first confidant", Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, unjustly incarcerated for seven years in the United States, wrote in the presentation of his book Confidential Poems.
And he added: "There is something very significant that we have in common: the mixture, in these poems, of the sweeping nature of the beloved motherland, an older woman and mother always present in my poetry".
Conceived as a tribute to the celebrated Chilean writer, Confidential Poems (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 112 pages), the second book of poems by Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, was born out of love and for love. It consists of 32 texts, in which the author, from his remembrances and his hope, shows unique sensitivity. Poems that, with a simple discourse, pay homage to the purest of man’s feelings.
Years of imprisonment have not prevented Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez from attesting, in poems like these, his unshakeable conviction:
Love, in this quiet time,
of empty mornings and austere twilight,
you will be within reach of my eyes
with your skin that enters my hope.
Who would have believed such cruelty,
dispossessed of the sun, the sea, everything?
But, what dreams could be mine,
but those of the breath of your sap?
I always imagine that you are a song
and that you come up with your syllables of dawn
to the solitude of my silence,
then I become a simple verse
in order to force all the evil
to desist if they try to separate us.
Before this poetry notebook, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez (Miami, USA, 1958) had presented his first poems in From This Height (2001). The son of Cuban parents, he returned to Cuba with his family when he was one month old to settle definitively in the island. Graduated as a civil engineer, in 1992 he settled in the United States, where six years later he was made a prisoner, tried, and unjustly sentenced, along with four other Cubans for defending the island’s sovereignty and peace in the world.
Love, poetry, liberation was the title of the text used by writer Angel Augier to launch Confidential Poems. "The warm lyric fervor, the anguish dyed with the tenderness love inspires, the anxiety to find in the beloved one the consolation and hope the soul needs –wrote the poet and researcher- is repeated in its generous and seductive variety, to structure a unique hymn made of many and diverse chapters".
Confidential Poems, with drawings by Jose Luis Fariñas, is a book that praises the most universal of human feelings. But, also, by singing to love, this poetry book becomes a beautiful plea for justice, peace, and dignity. Verses that Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez sings as an expression of truth and tenderness, of light and hope. Testimonies of the heart and of the mind.
October , 2005
(URl:http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=7&item=691&cont=show.php)
Cubanow.- "I have often imagined young Pablo Neruda in his room at the student boarding house of 513 Maruri Street, writing his poems, while in a dark and cold cell I wrote mine and made him my first confidant", Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, unjustly incarcerated for seven years in the United States, wrote in the presentation of his book Confidential Poems.
And he added: "There is something very significant that we have in common: the mixture, in these poems, of the sweeping nature of the beloved motherland, an older woman and mother always present in my poetry".
Conceived as a tribute to the celebrated Chilean writer, Confidential Poems (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 112 pages), the second book of poems by Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, was born out of love and for love. It consists of 32 texts, in which the author, from his remembrances and his hope, shows unique sensitivity. Poems that, with a simple discourse, pay homage to the purest of man’s feelings.
Years of imprisonment have not prevented Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez from attesting, in poems like these, his unshakeable conviction:
Love, in this quiet time,
of empty mornings and austere twilight,
you will be within reach of my eyes
with your skin that enters my hope.
Who would have believed such cruelty,
dispossessed of the sun, the sea, everything?
But, what dreams could be mine,
but those of the breath of your sap?
I always imagine that you are a song
and that you come up with your syllables of dawn
to the solitude of my silence,
then I become a simple verse
in order to force all the evil
to desist if they try to separate us.
Before this poetry notebook, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez (Miami, USA, 1958) had presented his first poems in From This Height (2001). The son of Cuban parents, he returned to Cuba with his family when he was one month old to settle definitively in the island. Graduated as a civil engineer, in 1992 he settled in the United States, where six years later he was made a prisoner, tried, and unjustly sentenced, along with four other Cubans for defending the island’s sovereignty and peace in the world.
Love, poetry, liberation was the title of the text used by writer Angel Augier to launch Confidential Poems. "The warm lyric fervor, the anguish dyed with the tenderness love inspires, the anxiety to find in the beloved one the consolation and hope the soul needs –wrote the poet and researcher- is repeated in its generous and seductive variety, to structure a unique hymn made of many and diverse chapters".
Confidential Poems, with drawings by Jose Luis Fariñas, is a book that praises the most universal of human feelings. But, also, by singing to love, this poetry book becomes a beautiful plea for justice, peace, and dignity. Verses that Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez sings as an expression of truth and tenderness, of light and hope. Testimonies of the heart and of the mind.
October , 2005
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