The snowy book has come to us, paradoxically, the days tempered by the sun. However, winter will still have something to say this year, and we may have bisuts, sauces and snowfalls again: the book of poems Alaska (Elkar, 2023), recently edited by Castillo Suárez (Altsasu, 1976), is a book full of those and more. Suárez has given the collection the name of an abandoned hotel on the edge of the highway of his hometown, where in addition to 54 poems, he has received a narrative post.

They predominate the issues of abandonment, loss and mourning, as well as the memory, memory and forgetfulness associated with them. These issues, as you know, are not news in the wording of the altsasuarra. His work Iraunera (Elkar, 2019), published in 2019, explores the same roads, and the bridges between the two collections are obvious: Perdure has snow and there are plants in Alaska. Suárez, recovering or creating new matures, uses powerful poetic figures on his lines: pieces stacked at the pass, lumpy seas, empty shelves and stuffed boxes, houses that keep the facade firm about to collapse, pieces of bark, scars and wounds, nests and abandoned pools, wild animals…

I poetic also appears to us painfully converted into a body with strength but that is part of a cold symbolic environment or landscape that is not entirely comfortable: “Sometimes the snow reaches the beach, / snow over the snow, / and I begin to swallow whiteness / to find my name in the sand: / here is the woman who lives from the snow, / the verifier of silence, / her enemy”.

But it's not all pain or disappointment, because it's never too late to start from scratch, and because what hurts us can change us. The era of grief is the expression of this poem, and the book is also a reflection of the poet’s reflection on the place occupied by writing or literature in general. These poems are a sign of the beauty of disaster, a stimulus to undertake progress or survival.