Born in Tenerife in 1984, Sergio Barreto is one of the most solid Canarian poets of those that emerged “from 1980”, that is, chronologically located after the last names included by Miguel Martinón in his current Canarian Poetry. (From 1980) (2010), with some of which he presents certain coincidences while offering, at the same time, undoubted singularity. He has published the collections of poems Los sentinelas (2011), Sangre de eclipse (2013), Libro del observatorio (2019, Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo Poetry Award 2012) and this El sol la estrella blanca. He is also the author of the novel Vs. (Benito Pérez Armas Award 2015) and the book of short stories Las estribaciones occidentales de Cydonia (2020). Between 2013 and 2015 he was coordinator of the Literature Area of the Ateneo de La Laguna and the Atelier des Fous cultural café, in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, where exhibitions of emerging artists, conferences, poetry readings, colloquiums and performances were held. Barreto has been a member of the editorial committee of the digital art and thought magazine Piedra y Cielo, a columnist for La Opinión de Tenerife (2016-2018) and has reviewed works and exhibitions for the annual report of TEA (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes) . He coordinated the daily bulletin El Mirador (2020) for the MiradasDoc International Documentary Festival. Collaborator of the poetry magazine Nayagua, of the José Hierro Poetry Center Foundation, he also participated in the Literary Activities Program in Public Secondary Schools Literary Encounters and in “Why read the classics”, promoted by the Ministry of Culture (2020).
It is a work presided over by metaphysical and sensory scrutiny, which advocates the fluidity of images of the world.
Miguel Martinón points out, in the aforementioned anthology, that some of the Canarian poets that emerged “since 1980” are situated in a line “committed to the experience of solitude and the desert and far from neorealist tendencies”, always interested in ” reconcile poetry and thought, in practicing a poetry-construction and in investigating the signs of insularity». All of this is also fulfilled in Sergio Barreto, but with its own characteristics, as can be clearly seen in El sol la estrella blanca. Composed of twenty-nine poems with a metric tending towards free silva, the book explores other forms, such as the prose poem (in seven compositions) or the haiku (in two cases, “Recibimiento” and “Mirador de San Roque”). The set revolves around a kind of cosmic and initiation exploration in which a precise insular topography (Benijo, Teno, Punta del Hidalgo, Izaña, Punta Rasca, Vilaflor, etc., without neglecting other islands, such as the case La Gomera) configures a journey of a metaphysical nature. Within the framework of the Canarian poetry of his generation and in the panorama of contemporary Spanish poetry, Barreto is distinguished by a cosmic design, in which the celestial space and the stars determine the human journey and the adventure of knowledge. «The night is infinite in its wisdom», reads the poem «Four moons, a chair and a girl». This verse seems to summarize or emblematize Barreto’s poetic vision. It is a journey through various natural elements that show the greatness and mystery of the Earth and the cosmos, a mystery that Sergio Barreto internalizes through sometimes unusual images and metaphors (“Above my face I can see / the mythical spiral of the galaxy, / the clusters that exist beyond / the Hubbel limit”) and that does not exclude mystical references (“the flight that catches up with the hunt”, to be precise, in the poem “The astronomer’s palace” ). The fundamental theme that focuses the collection of poems is, therefore, nature, the presence of the sun, the air, the water, although “terrestrial foods” (flour, bread, wine) also make an appearance. All this with words that elevate the language brought from the land itself. The poem “Lectora de Virgilio” is marked by a place and a date (“La Laguna, 3/10/2020”), unlike the other compositions, and this seems to be relevant to the author at least from the point of view of view of space-time coordinates. It is a poem of exaltation to the reader from a mystical sphere that is present and vanishes in an environment of papers and books, flexos and marijuana: «The night covers the body of the house. […] // The one who reads Virgilio, in the limits / psychic, almost mystical, pierces / the capillaries of this world / and marks with the alabaster fork / a verse that my voice turns into air». Sergio Barreto maintains his intention to delve into the senses, the metaphysical manifestations attracted by a living feeling that shares the experience as a recipient of the excessive force of nature: “You can burn my retinas and give me chaotic visions of solstices and equinoxes.” In another poem, “Alimenta a un gallo”, Barreto chooses the voice of Téano, 496 BC. C., to enter the world of daily chores, denying any intention of keeping silence after the death of his lover, Pythagoras. A beautiful poem —perhaps the best in the book— that recovers the existence of “the things that exist, invisible and visible.” Giving voice to Téano, the mathematician, philosopher and member of the Pythagorean school, implies a certain culturalism, which often appears in the book, something that is also affected by some classical mythological references (Medusa, the tritons, the Daimones, the dryads). , sometimes causing a certain secrecy that does not make concessions to the reader, thus forced to seek and interpret hidden keys.
Included by Miguel Martinón in ‘Ultimate Canarian Poetry’, but with its own characteristics reaffirmed in the new installment
El sol la estrella blanca (with its variant “El sol la tierra blanca” in a verse of the poems) is a book presided over by metaphysical and sensory scrutiny that advocates the continuous fluidity of the attractive images of the world, contemplative and reflective images that transport us to the primary universe of sensations almost always linked to the perception and experience of the insular space. Sergio Barreto closes this collection of poems with the verses entitled “Mirador de San Roque”, where he refers both to the Orion constellation and to the hunter and to Hui Shi, a Chinese philosopher famous for his ten paradoxes on the relativity of time and space. Barreto alludes to or rather insinuates the fine line between “what enters the poem / or escapes from it”, of the senses and the perception of reality, after his own feeling.
Rigorous, beautiful and mature poetry. Poetry capable of leading us to an empirical and sensitive knowledge that is given to us by Nature. “The night is infinite in its wisdom.”
