Cajoncito [A Little Drawer]: Poems on Love, Loss y Otras Locuras [and Other Follies]” is a book of remarkable poetry by Elizabeth M. Castillo, a British-Mauritian poet living in Paris with her family, who has also lived before in Chile, Mauritia, and the DRC. She is widely published in various languages in which she composes, notably English, Spanish of two countries, and French. My introduction to a smattering of her poetry in English two years ago was through Twitter, where I first encountered her work. At long last, when her second book, Not Quite an Ocean is now out and being read, I find the first still holding its own in the warp and woof of my poetic memory (to use an artistic image as much as possible in the manner of the ones I admire in her work). The first book is a tribute as well to her life with numerous other people whom she has loved, and some of whom she has lost.
Her artistic words are ordinary and simple if multitudinous and mightily creatively used words for passion, and feeling. Not only do words in English and Spanish–only the first of which I came to the work knowing more than a smattering of–respond easily and richly to her call, but they say things, visit emotional places one may have felt, but never known how to have put in one’s emotional passport legally.
The territories and lands of the transgressions against love and the grief resulting, as well as grief and longing drawn from other sources crafted for life, are painted here in vivid language colors, sometimes in matched, paired poems in which some words of Spanish in one and English in the other are reversed, sewing the two bright place languages together like the covers of a book of poetry.
There is too much to quote, too many inspirations to follow down the corridors of the heart of this poet’s work: you have to read it for yourself. Before, I have always been a curious but casual peruser of the Spanish version of the English bus and other public announcements on American walls and ceilings, attempting in my primitive way to match the correct pairs of words. For the first time, but I hope not last, I meet the natural aristocracy of someone’s language who has mastered both, and who can vary them back and forth easily at will, making of them in her matched sets of poems a wife and husband completing each other’s sentences, interrupting, interjecting, but always in complete agreement for the reader, who only has to locate the translated portion in the matching poem to learn “for sure” what the “foreign” phase or sentence means. And learning in any way at all is always lovely. And it’s there that the virtue and smugness of “knowing for sure” is also trickily understood in all life ventures to be a form of foolhardiness and loss except in love with life and language, which have in some way to make their declarations of certainty for the time in spite of really not knowing, as the poet more or less outright states she would have it. I find that I almost begin to understand instinctively portions of the Spanish from this gentle and loving example of what used to be called “immersion” learning, as if in the hands of a dedicated and talented tutor or teacher.
Castillo’s major poetic virtue, and she has many, is thus her comprehensive expressiveness and rich texture of images and references to simple enough things about life that become complex again as she puts them in words. One feels almost as if one oneself is becoming gifted enough to understand a new and alien language about life and its doings and “loves, losses, y otras locuras” (as she puts it in her title).
Finally, the greatest reader’s gratitude I have for Elizabeth M. Castillo as the author of the book is that she makes me stretch myself and my own experiences over the framework of her embroidery hoop to be needled and pierced by her lovely work, a set of images and feelings that I never knew I needed so badly before she created them. Please buy this book and read it soon, and then buy Not Quite an Ocean to see what she is doing!
8/5/23, by Victoria Leigh Bennett (shadowoperator)
creativeshadows 