Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE).- Marina Perezagua was born in Seville 43 years ago, she has spent more than half of her life in New York, at whose university she is a professor of Creative Writing and, after publishing three novels and signing articles in the national press, makes her debut as a poet with “Nana de la medusa” (Espasa), which she considers “a commitment to freedom”.
In her poems, as she said in an interview with EFE, she talks about “deep love, full or exhausted sexuality, madness, my motherhood, a state of well-being that I had never known before, a bet – more than ever- for freedom, freedom in all senses, but above all of expression”, and of themes, issues, words and concepts that, at times, may have seemed more typical of prose than of poetry.
“I never wrote poetry, but I have always been a good poetry reader. When the confinement arrived, I took a tent and went to a remote place in the mountains, of extraordinary beauty, a torcal where the rocks overlapped one another like giants… Due to the not very comfortable conditions in which I was -without my computer or phone-, I could only write in a fragmented way, because that was how I was living, that’s where this book came from”.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2016
“In fact, the first poem I wrote talked about it: ‘Esguince Mundo'”, recalled Perezagua, to continue evoking:
“The feeling of knowing that at that time there were few people looking at the sky full of stars at night or totally disconnected from the world, gave me a great capacity for reflection, purity, in a literary sense. I mean: I wrote without thinking how these poems would be received.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2016, Perezagua has assured about “Nana de la Medusa” that it is a collection of poems that “can be seen as a diary, although I think that what is erotic, or death, or life, it is not so much a question of relations with those categories as a connection stimulated by the very natural environment in which it was”.
Athlete and specialist in long-distance swimming and diving – her deep apnea record in free immersion modality, without fins, is 46 meters -, the writer took advantage of that retreat, which she prolonged until she had to ration the water and food, not only to write verses:
The confinement of Marina Perezagua
“In the mornings I climbed, and at night I thought that I had never felt so free, and I had time to think and write about the last few years, which had not been very positive. I was there for two months and I really did not even know what stage of the confinement we were in, but I lengthened it naturally, lengthening that freedom that I did not feel before in the maelstrom of work, the social requirements ”.
“Not all the poems in the book have to do with a natural environment, there are also more urban poems, however, I think that the city in this book would not exist if it had not taken that distance from the megapolis in which I live”, he added Marina Perezagua.
Regarding that strange period of thought, he pointed out: “I imagine that, like everyone else, at that time we wondered if the world would be better after the pandemic; I was sure that it wasn’t, and it’s not that I’m pessimistic, on the contrary, but as we later learned, indeed the planet does not seem to have a very distant future.
Personal relationships have also worsened. Back at work, I suffered episodes of abuse of power by ladies who consider themselves feminists…”.
“For me this book will always be a before and after that demonstrates the importance of solitude to see our environment more clearly, as well as a world that was and is no longer. When we locked ourselves up at home (due to confinement), a few days were enough for the dolphins to dare to reach the ports, nature was recovering to a level that we would not have suspected. Now pollution is skyrocketing again… ”, he concluded. EFE