The Lost Book of Loynaz

This curious “emotion-book” – as it is defined on its back cover – has a double origin, with two other books as protagonists. And a year ago the Creotz publishing house presented an exquisitely edited work: the ‘Bestiario’ written in her youth and that Dulce María Loynaz rescued from a drawer in the eighties. It was a small poetic revenge, after a failure in Natural History that she considered completely unfair. To commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban woman’s last visit to Spain – in April 1993, to collect the Cervantes –, Creotz commissioned the Santander artist Mo Gutiérrez Serna to illustrate the original text, which appeared in 2023 in a very careful canvas edition. . Gutiérrez Serna graphically reinterpreted Loynaz’s collection of poems from a contemporary perspective, but not without nods to the avant-garde echoes of the original text.

But along with the chapter on the animal kingdom, Loynaz had written two other notebooks, which were lost: those dedicated to the mineral and plant kingdoms. So, as a particular tribute to those lost texts, the publisher now presents this ‘Sweet Herbal’, where the structure is recreated…