Poetry
Clamor
Not translated into English
Dora Castellanos · 1948
Synopsis
A first book of love poems, written very young and published despite lack of money. Short pieces in which passion is spoken in the first person and without detour, addressed to a you who is never named. The form is traditional, the verse metred and rhymed, and nothing in it comes from the formal experiments that then occupied the capital's journals. The poet signed her texts with a first name other than her own, which she kept all her life.
Context
The book appeared in 1948 from Iqueima, the house of Clemente Airó, an exiled Spaniard whose journal Espiral then brought together the young poets of the capital: that is, from the publisher who brought out, the same year, the first prose book by another author in this catalogue. The author was twenty-four and worked as a secretary in the civil service. The sources are divided on the book's rank: some make it her first, others say she had published a first volume at fifteen, ten years earlier.
Who it is for
A slim collection in Spanish, with no French translation. Love poetry of traditional form, which can be read without preparation.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author known and immediately won her a readership that seventy-five years of poetry have not belied.