words by Gerardo Fulleda León
The poetic prose of Jesus Lara Sotelo is unleashed between the vigil and the dream in his most recent literary delivery: Lebensraum. A swarm of images besieges us when we go, in its pages, from one surprise to the other in successive scales, while his verb leads us from a labyrinth of experiences to a clarity that is more common of what’s visionary than what’s insane. It is that type of insanity that from time to time keeps us within reality, always heading for its own extermination. Barely without resting, he amazes us with the way he makes accomplices of his tribulations and findings, with the same intensity of a teenager amazed by the light of the stars but also with the depth of a hermit that treasures all the wisdom of the universe.
And it is this last paradox, typical of the root of the great dramatic literature, the one giving the domain of his expression with such singularity, using a making where the fragmentation of situations he goes through reveals conflicts that come up to the surface with dynamic features of identity and the fibers and moods that fight in his biographical sketches. These, on their own rootedness, face us up to our own interrogations that shape and damage us at the same time, as the contemporary human beings we are with him since he knows how to collect his own beat, and the one by those who have inspired in adjoining premises, in order to recreate them in their reevaluations, in another extension of high creative level.
Nothing further from the vacuous realism or the mere reproduction of reality and its hardships is what we will find in his vignettes, series and soliloquies. The poet does not want to portrait or reflect common situations, but to create a new imaginary space to interpret in a reflexive and ludic way those sensitive aspects of the personal daily events. For that, he hallucinates, contradicts himself, breathes, encourages, resizes and arrives to his own illuminations. Aware just like T.S. Eliot that “humankind cannot bear very much reality”, his work wants more than denouncing, he wants to make us ring out the senses with unusual changes and to reason directly with the transgressor turbulences of what’s unprecedented.
Alien to the common places of contemporary poetry, among us his poetic work turns out to be a sort of challenge to the reducing fundaments of our wrongly called common sense. Every step, in every station he reveals us something more than reasoning or guidelines, some openings towards the conscience of our emotional insularity, to that risky and intense effusiveness we lack of since the disappearance of the bard Angel Escobar. It is a “cursed” inheritance that Lara gathers, transmutes and resizes to the style of these times, with a visionary’s lucidity, and whose call we will always support in their moves, when anxiety or coolness trouble us.
A poetry that generates questions that owes so much to the integrating perspective he assumes in his canvass, in a comprehensive effort where sensuality and irreverence, more than positions, turn out to be ligaments of the human nature that reveals like a crossroad where we will have to walk to pay the price of recognizing ourselves: alone with our own desires, passions and frustrations, to thread our own division to his magnet and which the poet has achieved to leave us in this session as “a lonely man looking towards west”.
