Setting the scene

In his first two major collections of poetry, Élegos (1967) and Muerte y memoria (1972), Eugenio Montejo presents us with the foundations of what will become his poetic universe. Much like the actual universe, these early poetic building blocks constitute not so much a stage which will be left behind, buried under the subsequent pages of poetry, as one which grows by expansion, the symbols, concerns, and topoi becoming more complex and intertwined, but the essential matter out of which all is, ultimately, formed remaining the same.

As their titles indicate, these early collections are bound up with death and mourning, and, in line with these central thematics, Montejo sets up two distinct spaces and times in these works: the childhood and youthful past of the poetic yo and the present of the poet and his poetry as it looks back on and surveys that past, this dialectic being particularly prevalent in Élegos. The first lines of the first poem of this collection, ‘En los bosques de mi antigua casa’, introduce us to this schema and set out the scene on which the rest of the collection will build, as we are told how ‘En los bosques de mi Antigua casa | oigo el jazz de los muertos’ (É, 5). The poetic yo remembers those who are now dead, hearing their music in his mind, which in turn adds to the sombre ambience. But it is the backdrop to this music and this remembrance that anchors both these lines and the collection as a whole. They indicate the setting of the past which is described and mourned in Élegos as being the rural house of the poetic yo’s childhood, hinting, in the process, at the Vallejian debt to be found in Montejo’s early poetry, here chiming with Vallejo’s ‘Canciones de hogar’ in particular. This casa represents the central location in seven of the twenty-one poems that make up Élegos, and within it and around it Montejo constructs the full space of the past homestead.

The rural location of this homestead is emphasised by a focus on the presence of trees both in the bosques of the opening poem and throughout the collection.