Tucumán poet Sylvina Bach continues with this new book (Gerania Editora, Tucumán, 2025), her fourth collection of poems, a stylized work about memory and feelings. Through colloquial and simple language, without embellishments of any kind, the poems collected here deal with themes such as childhood, home, motherhood, and affection. But, as Jorge Boccanera once said about the importance of time as a theme in poetry, its fleeting nature is central to Bach’s work. And it is so through a nostalgic perception of the past.
The poems are short but free of any perceptible harshness. Unrestrained, they are rarely cryptic. And when they are, it is to present us with a certain symbolist vibration. We could say that her sensibility is more neo-romantic, seeking to fuse landscapes with emotion. It’s afternoon / and you don’t know what to do with this impatience. // In the distance / in the clarity of the hillside / that you have looked at so many mornings / you see how the clouds suddenly / break away from the rain. / On that plot / so close and so far from your home / the hill thunders / and you remember / your childhood in this land, / when you believed that only the sea / was the horizon / and the hill your only shelter. With subtle and evocative patience, the poet weaves this fine labyrinth of days and hours gone by. Childhood—perhaps the true paradise—is one of her most precious treasures. It is a need to dig trenches in an ever more fortunate past, more generous in the truthfulness of luminous and pure feelings. Time, after all, always insufficient (because it is incessant), is what drives much of this collection of intimate pieces. Its celebration, its heartbreak: its mark on the skin. The work of the hours / is life passing by.
Thus, the twilight gaze prevails. Faced with ghostly nothingness, where can we take refuge but in the fragment of a certain eternity in the form of memory? If I asked you / what you would have preserved / of all that was lost, / would you say / your mother’s songs? / the tree that cared for you as a child? / your father’s voice at night? / the first time you saw the sea? Time immemorial of warmth, of words lost in the air, and in the color of the night shared by loved ones, which grew among voices. And to recreate this lost magic, the poet uses the continuity of memories to project the most intimate modulations of her voice onto the pages. Memories / push my hand when I write, Bach warns us. Her images mark (and demarcate) a territory in flight. Memory / pure life in my heart.
The ritual of the most sacred feelings, such as those of love, take her through other degrees of emotional intensity. Only I hear / this voice that repeats itself / in the spaces where you are not, or: Now it is difficult to know / that you will not come to this café / that I will not have / your fingers feeling my pulse; / you liked to feel / my blood beating. A love that at other times is transmuted into maternal love: Silence in the garden / you had discovered a stick insect. / Your amazement was laughter and wind / and your child’s silhouette / came to tell me that you were growing up. The joy of motherhood; life—beating—fleeting. In another aesthetic twist, the voice splits in two. It clings to the past, to childhood. The smells, colors, voices, and images that form a personal mythology sanctify memory. Time scares me / like a monster in the closet, / and closing my eyes isn’t enough to make it go away. And she takes refuge in that other eternity called home. It is there, under its symbolic figure, that the essential crossroads of her poetry operates: between memory and desire, germinating into lyrical dazzlement. My house unites / the everyday and the transcendent, / it vindicates what I am / over what I was. / It is the cave where I shed my skin. Bach reconstructs something of that memory—what she experienced—something of those paternal caresses, the voices of her loved ones when she was a child, in the house, under that domestic order. Is it a temporary happiness? It is difficult to know. What is certain is that we cannot doubt the sincerity of her words, the yearning imaginative fabric with which the verses are woven: their evocative modulation that leads us straight to the heart.
Perhaps her poetics are perfectly condensed in these verses of hers: At the end of this night / I walk in silence; / my heart is / a handful of snow. A love that fades but continues to shine. A delicate voice that resists.
In times of noise, cynicism, and uprootedness, Sylvina Bach’s poetry offers an intimate music that does not raise its voice but remains. There are no stridencies, no masks, no empty rhetoric. There is a place for what is lost, what is fragile, what cannot be repeated but can be named. There, where the poetic word retains its brilliance as a gesture of love for what has been lived.
