Caballos y café: Poetic responses to time and death in the poetry of Eugenio Montejo

Abstract

Much of the poetry of Eugenio Montejo is characterized by a deep concern with and description of loss on a variety of levels: poetic, ontological, and experiential,1 with the effects of the passing of time constituting a central topos from his earliest works until at least the poems of Partitura de la cigarra (1999).2 Amongst the most recurrent examples of these effects is that of time’s changing the alive into the dead. His poems, in particular in the early collections Élegos (1967),3 Muerte y memoria (1972),4 and Algunas palabras (1976),5 are replete with references to ‘los vivos’ and ‘los muertos’, with the latter often referred to as ‘los ‘ausentes’, thus drawing implicit attention to the dead and the alive as defined by their absence and presence respectively. It is a distinction which, as the most obvious and frightening effect of time’s passing, is also one that Montejo’s poetics works to annul and represents Montejo’s most explicit thematic area in his poetic attempt to retrieve what is lost and ultimately to end the process of loss. The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which Montejo’s poetics uses and develops two central personal and national motifs, the horse and coffee, as it attempts both to describe and poetically to overcome this distinction between the dead and the alive.