CASERIO (H)UZ(S)TEN
Oskar Gaztelu
Erein, 2023

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They say that poetry allows Oskar Gaztelu to count the incontestable with a few words (Larrabetzu, 1964). Despite his experience, he has recently published his first post. Ernestina de Champourcín 32. Winner of the Poetry Prize has published the book Baserria (h)uz(s)ten (Erein, 2023), with 22 poems and 11 reflections. The image that stands out from the collection as indicated by the title is that of abandoned and emptied farmhouse, but the farmhouse goes beyond being a mere rural house.

A poetic landscape, cured by Gaztelu, of garden, tender rain and a box filled with ancestral treasures, brings us closer to the customs and ways of life in danger of extinction, to the knowledge that will disappear with the adult generation, to the relationship between life and death, to the various cycles that exist in nature, to the memory that keep things and spaces and to the solitude and emptiness that the loss implies: "From time to time, with peace / access to my small cottage / within my childhood. / I cannot say we were happy, / but I like / hear in the same place the echo of the years (…)".

But the cottage is for Gaztelu a home that feeds the personal poetic voice. In this sense, the importance of the mother's death and her subsequent mourning in the collection stands out. Poems about or directed at the mother permeate the book with an emotional tone: absence occupies more space than presence. April is one of the poems in which it is reflected: "I don't know if I'm going to be here, but spring/coming," he said. / Spring is here./ Flowers wait for her, / to see if someone frees them from weeds. - This year my mother will not take me."

Although in some cases we could say that reflection is a balance between themes and poetics, poems are an exact search for ways to express what are terrible: a kind of attempt to leave the caserades so that the lower fires remain on.