It makes us live, model everything around us, interact: we cannot deny that history and stories cannot be separated by straight lines. What was recently published by Mari Luz Esteban (Pedrosa de Valdeporres, Castilla y León, 1959) is as follows: The meat reform (Pamiela, 2023) has named Esteban his third poem, which leads critics to bypass the denominations on the basis of citizenship, which invites reflection on the political and, therefore, on the personal also political.

Every verb game would be to translate 60 poems grouped into the usual language in the nine necessary sections. In fact, the book involves those related to sharpness and guilt, from the childhood of the past to the present that is decisive for a future letter that has not been realized. Well, in a way, we could say that poems are between the verbs “I” and “come,” but on a more political level than strictly temporal: “The time has come to look the past face to face / in the future / in the darkest memory.”

So things, there's something in these lines. Far from Romanticism, the poetic voice looks rigorously at the phenomena that have crossed Euskal Herria in recent decades, and even the remains that these phenomena have left in our beings and bodies: “The peoples have deindustrialized for the benefit of the builders / our heritage is going down, eliminating our memory / but it is us / with the waste of our industrial identity / not knowing what to do”. In this sense, the collection raises increasingly famous and usual questions that seek, in general, traces of the possible Basque identity that once prevailed. Among them is the poem Nork esan zaigu, whose theme is feminism and vulnerability, and the theoretical model that is part of the book: “I’m going to say / basque / meted / restored / renovated / imagine / convenient”.

Although the dominant narrative tone and the explicit character of rumor may weaken the poeticity of some poems, the importance recognized to the body by the poetic images handled coincides with the direction of the collection, that is, with the claim to live in a village of flesh and bone more versatile than stone. Despite all verbal play, therefore, it is evident that poems are oriented towards the future.