Patricia Crespo addresses uncertainty as a process of life in her new collection of poems

Uncertainty Manifesto (Olélibros, 2022), Patricia Crespo's third collection of poems, is a finalist for the Valencian Critics Awards in the poetry category.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
04 April 2023 Tuesday 02:51
30 Reads
Patricia Crespo addresses uncertainty as a process of life in her new collection of poems

Uncertainty Manifesto (Olélibros, 2022), Patricia Crespo's third collection of poems, is a finalist for the Valencian Critics Awards in the poetry category. These poems defend uncertainty as a necessary part of the life process and, far from the negative connotations that we associate with this concept, invite us to perceive it as the threshold of possibilities. The Valencian author has previously published Erosgrafías (2018) and Cantos de la desesperanza (2020), both in Bohodón Ediciones

That future that caused fear according to Nietzsche, is what we discover as the only constant in our lives. Starting from the journey of four stages: entropy, cycle of consolations, EVP and metamorphosis, we move from chaos through emptiness, doubts and confusion caused by the blow of pain in human beings, to the assumption of loss. in "cycle of consolations".

In "psychophonies" uncertainty slips along the labile edge of the search for an identity, for a voice of its own that drives away the shadows and voices of a past, to conclude in a "metamorphosis" that allows the reconstruction of new certainties, that the Time will end up turning into uncertainties again, into an eternal return, as the structure of the collection of poems presents in a dialogue between the first and the last poem.

It is a collection of poems that reflects and makes us reflect from a refined, concise style, with high lexical precision, with the absence of adjectives. Each one of the parts is introduced with some verses by Spanish (and Valencian) poets: María Beneyto, Paca Aguirre, Guadalupe Grande, but also Alejandra Pizarnik or Ida Vitale. The symbolic and expressive cover is the work of the Valencian collagist María Vega.

As Dovstoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov “men want to fly, but they fear the void. They cannot live without certainties, that's why they change the flight for cages. The cages where certainties live”. The poet invites us to open that cage and let uncertainty fly: "Birds beat and you say cage"