Custodio Tejada: inner journey – La Opinión de Málaga

I always celebrate the arrival of a book into the home and if it is poetry even more so, although I know that this genre, so reviled by the majority of the reading public, does not occupy the place it deserves. At least, we will settle for that minority of readers who drink from the spirit and emotion that a good book of poetry should bring to those who approach it with delight. Poetry books are the best food for the soul and delving into the depths of each one of them, a unique opportunity to learn about the world and its miseries, to continue living. One of those books is, with all certainty, ‘Brújula veleta’, by Custodio Tejada (Purullena, Granada, 1969), published by Entorno Grafico Ediciones (2023). This collection of poems invites us on a journey that can be both interior and exterior; knowing ourselves and the world around us, its interstices, its lights and shadows, an adventure in the growing light of poetry. With this book, the seventh of those delivered to date by the author, we will get to know the poet in his continuous wanderlust, eager to discover places and become part of them as well. The six previous collections of poems that support Tejada’s career are: ‘Roses of light and shadow’ (2002), ‘Crystal urn’ (2006), ‘The habitat we step on’ (2008), ‘Snow stork’ (2012), ‘Memories and coordinates’ (2014) and ‘ A horizon of meanings’ (2021).

‘Brújula vaneta’ is a corpus of poems structured or divided into three parts: ‘The eyes of the journey’, ‘Geography and destiny. Book of compasses’ and ‘Metapoetics of passage’, but not before immersing ourselves in each of them the poet warns us of his condition as a traveler with two illuminating quotes or epigraphs; the first, by Henry Miller: «Writing, like life itself, is a journey of discovery. The writer sets out on the path to become the path himself”; the second, by Jorge Luis Borges: “When you miss a place, what you really miss is the time that corresponds to that place, you don’t miss the places, but the times.” Without a doubt, These two quotes are the epicenter through which Custodio Tejada’s poetic discourse will travel. Space and time come together in this surprising collection of poems by Tejada from his first poems: ‘Reality and fantasy’, ‘Odyssey’ and ‘A footprint in history’; The journey begins: “The tear becomes a metaphor / of the traveler who, after leaving, rocks / the sun in his luggage / of a bird of passage and a wind rose”, and the journey continues, and like Ulysses sails towards his arcadia: «The odyssey as a paradigm / of all trances, events, escapes, / at the same time agency and tourist office, the word amulet / in which / the hope of man is summarized / and the ultimate meaning of memory» . The second leg of the trip, the longest, is dedicated to Tejada to the places (Tenerife, Prado Museum, Paris, Toledo, Japan, New York, Trevi Fountain, Florence, Barcelona or Prague, among other cities) and as a preamble two timely quotes, one from Cavafy and another from Pizarnik. The journey to all these places is nothing more than an inner search, because “The eyes never live / the same time” and the poet abstracts himself into the existence of a truth, his truth?: «The truth is never an inhospitable place, / not even a ghost territory, / it is found everywhere / or in some more than others. // Only the hyenas of resentment / seek the blind story of hate.

Contextualize, open the windows and dream of other worlds, that at the end of the day is another way of understanding reality, the space and the time that we have had to live, until we reach the true reason of the traveler, which is nothing more than knowing oneself, diving into the bowels of nothingness and let yourself be carried away, without further ado: «the sine qua non of the traveler / is to discover oneself through / the gaze of the other. / An inner journey that goes from the ethereal / to the tangible, / from what is seen to what is intuited, / from what you forget to what you remember. Tejada is that poet who delves deep without stopping to look at what is happening around him, contemplating the world as it is announced at each moment, looking for a place, homeland or home for the disinherited: «And in the narrow passage of Gibraltar / the most disinherited of the feast / they jump the fence of the Mediterranean / to reach the shores / of the promised land that lies. Brújula veleta is a lucid collection of poems, which contains many keys, a necessary journey to the center, to the core of human identity, of solidarity in its essential way of sharing and cooperating, of living in constant communion with the “other”, and thus he writes, in homage to the gypsy people: “They are among us / because they are from this land, / their blood-light so “certifies it, / his party and our affection.” There will be many discoveries for the reader in this book, among them the poet’s attention to the vicissitudes of modernity, of exacerbated consumerism, «Click and fly 5 days to Seoul Korea / 2×1 offer with free companion / on low-cost planes cost requests / a slot to reserve space…”, as well as the growing concern about the indiscriminate use of plastic: “Time is a plastic jellyfish / that when swallowed kills me / without knowing if I am the last / and my species will end with me ». Tejada concludes this interesting collection of poems with ‘Metapoética del paso’, and it will be in this part of the book where the poet will face the loneliness experienced after the days of Covid with a cluster of haikus: «Empty streets / and dog barking / in balconies. // Coronavirus: / batucada of stars / in a morgue. // Resentment grows / in direct proportion / to fanaticism. // Only challenge: / from now on / live without fear»; and If to save himself from trafficking, the poet chooses writing as a refuge to continue living, the word as a revealing light: «Every journey is a book or a room. / Every book is a journey or a bed. // When a poet is silent / in the wake of the silence he leaves / the essence of the poem begins. Custodio Tejada makes an internal journey that leaves no doubt about his good work as a poet.