Before the Water / Jade Castellanos
The poet Jade Castellanos writes a gift of enigma in ninety-six compositions, in one of the shortest poetic genres that Japan contributed to universal literature: it is the haiku, written in Mexico, in which the author dusts off and recreates the best of tradition, to give us a bundle of songs that weave the thin voice of silence, the invisible body of the enigma and the luminous cry of loneliness.
What Jade Castellanos has built in this book is a memorial of the sigh: a succession of moments that liquefy in the word the traces of memory and the juices of life. What is Before the Water is the newborn creation in the amazement and silence of the primordial word.
We are the sum of our silences when the reason for our writing pays tribute to love. The author’s pen melts in these verses: “From fire I come / chimera’s red flower / unto the dawn”; and likewise in these others: “Feverishly / like an ecstatic mare / I’m going to you.”
On the other side of the heart, the same seventeen syllables in three verses are also an instrument of social criticism. The author says: “Where the children / ask for treat or trick / they get shot”; then, with a writing of superior craftsmanship, she refines the telescopic sight of the poem, and finishes: “A sun deader / than all of the dead / prays for them.”
The moment of the haiku, in all of the corners and surroundings that we have investigated in Before the Water, is not of this earth or this world: it is calligraphy that nails its roots in a beyond of us that belongs to the architecture of another time and perhaps to the allegory of the celestial spheres. —Leopoldo González
Before the Water is the 29th title of Darklight’s bilingual poetry series. It has an introduction by Leopoldo González and a beautiful cover and interior illustrations by the Mexican graphic artist Alonso Venegas.
