The first poem of Love holds the weight of the night sets the pace of the book, locates the poet’s voice Natalia Romero and establishes the rules of your game. He narrates, in a constant coming and going of time, all the stories on which he will later focus. The second, just seven verses, ends with a “look.” that marks the essential thing to be able to say. The father points to birds and says their names, reflecting the importance of finding the words to name some and murmur others.
The rest of the poems fall like a waterfall and that is how the author wrote them. “The book was created while I was writing something else.. “He wrote and lived,” says Romero in conversation with Indie Today-. It was without realizing it, as I think things (or almost all) happen in writing. Something appears and is going to mark its course.”
Without knowing exactly where she was going, the poet discovered that she has certain stories that she needed to tell. “In this book I feel like my dad appears for the first time. His place in my life, which is very linked to the landscape in which I grew up, where I was raised. And from there, everything that became part of my story, I didn’t realize that the big question was now for me: that’s why the first poem is ‘Where am I’. It took me a lot to encourage myself to do this,” the poet reflects and she emphasizes the importance of Andi Nachón, poet, screenwriter and teacher who accompanied her writing process.
Love holds the weight of the nightpublished by the publisher Caleta Oliviais the fourth collection of poems by the author born in Bahía Blanca, who also coordinates writing workshops and directs the Las Celebraciones arts and writing school. In this book, as in his previous ones, we once again see the contrast between light and darkness, love and fear, the great themes of the collection of poems.
“Love and fear can sometimes be the same -says Romero-. I actually learned this once, many years ago in a yoga class. The teacher, Teresa, told us to touch our chests in meditation: ‘Feel what is happening in your heart now. Fear and love live in the same place, and there is no room for both.’” It was through these poems that the author was able to get closer to her fear. “I was encouraged to look at it more closely,” he concludes.
Reading Natalia Romero we immediately realize that, although there are traces of fear in her poems, it is love that triumphs. Love, tenderness, patience, poetry. Love not only sustains the night, but also the poem and the poet. As she writes: “How nice to kiss and laugh/ as if we were not afraid/ as if fear had never existed.”
Love holds the weight of the night by Natalia Romero is available in bookstores.
