A Heart Museum
Leire Vargas
Elkar, 2024

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The Basque cultural system has a thirst for young people. That's what Leire Vargas said in the written column in Berria. The industry is looking for fresh, varied and diverse blood. In the end, however, the same names appear here and there. Varied and diverse yes, but in carelessness, the name of a herd is the one that endows our cultural grill. We understood that. Oxymorone has collateral damage, which may not be so adjacent. How can we create calmly if the thirst of this cultural system is being quenched? How do you spend your time writing?

In contrast to this culture devouring logic, the second poetry of Vargas is written. Three years after publishing the illusion that everything is a dream, Elkarrekin, a Heart Museum, arrives again. We don't know if it's a lot or a little bit of time, but we've noticed a calmness in writing that we sometimes miss.

The book presents a self and crudely shows the materiality of the body of the “I”: “I have torn my skin / I am flesh now / resisting / incapable of the wild bloodstream”. In this way, language will reach places where the body does not arrive, which language, although inevitably transforms it awkwardly, means: “Now we have the language / but our languages are far away / whatever they would like from the mouth”. Wanting and unable to reach, poems advance in the conflict of impotence of language until a solution is found: they introduce the world into the bodily part of language. Put the poppies in your mouth.

The conflict is divided into three parts: The Tide, the Waste and a new house. In the first, language is valid, but not, to talk about the pain of loss. In the second, the voice fights with the sands that the tide has left: “Looking back / it’s easy / igniting things.” In the last section, this fire allows to build a “different” house, “looking forward / since then I was left from the ashes / new images”.

Well, we don't know there's anything to say, but a book like that can't be written serenely. The Basque cultural system will have a thirst for youth. We, however, prefer calm.