Antonia Cortés presents her fifth book of poems: Tierra

The journalist and writer from La Mancha, Antonia Cortés, has just published her fifth book of poetry: Tierra, seven years after En un instante (In an instant), both published by Huerga y Fierro. 

Tierra has forewords by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre and Jon Andión, who will accompany the author, together with Rafael Soler, at the presentation on 4 February (7 p.m.) at the Café Comercial in Madrid. Both of them travel the paths that Cortés' verses furrow, they stop and enter that world of conflicting feelings that explode, that rebel, that caress, that cry and then move on and enjoy life. 'It is a profoundly warm and fiercely human poetry,' says Pérez Azaústre.

The cover picture and the two images inside are by Natking (Juan Luis García Céspedes), an artist from Ciudad Real who found the strength to accompany the author despite the illness that won the battle for him. Natking had already produced the drawings for Antonia Cortés' first collection of poems, La Mirada de la Luna, 25 years ago, with a foreword by Valentín Arteaga.

If in her work En un instante, with a foreword by the late Patxi Andión, the author invited us to live life to the full, because in a second everything changes, Tierra is the confirmation of that reality in her experiences and in the world, as we see in the pandemic and wars. Tierra, which brings together 43 poems and 3 prose pieces, talks about the pain of absence, like the poem dedicated to the actor Pepe Martín; about the need for them to be there; about disappointments; about gratitude for what has been learnt; about inner coldness, about eternity... ‘In Tierra are my roots, the sadness and the celebration of life, the exaltation of the beauty of the La Mancha landscape where I take refuge and gather strength,’ says the poet. It is also, she adds, a song to who we are because of what we were taught, and the realisation that the little things are the big things: a sunrise, a moon, a fire, a caress or a smile. 

Pérez Azaústre writes in his prologue: ‘This sweet desolation of Antonia Cortés's poems is a passionate faith in life. There is not only sadness or her pain... there is also a very vital response with tenderness standing tall, because she knows how to draw strength from the earth as her agitated fingers dialogue with the roughness of the deep roots... This book of poems has been felt, and has been intensely made’.

Jon Andión emphasises that ‘Antonia Cortés is a poet of mantras, currents and roots and, in her condition, she is the centre of her heritage and the centre of her strength and the centre of her wound, she is the navigator of her pulse with the world, of the time of her times, with all the roles in the air, the possibilities of truth after truth after truth’.

For the journalist and poet Javier Lostalé: ‘Tierra is very exciting. A collection of poems to keep close at hand’. While the writer Pedro Antonio González emphasises that it is poetry ‘without rhetorical filters’, written from the heart, formally elaborated on parallel structures and frequent repetitions; and, he adds, that poems like ‘Amanece’ can make you feel a sense of immortality.