THE TAMED DEATH IN THE POETIC WORK OF EFRAÍN BARQUERO

Abstract

Within the various themes addressed by the poetic work of Efraín Barquero, this article focuses on Barquero’s metaphysical perspective systematized by the poet in the selected works analyzed here. This Barquerian poetic metaphysics is configured as the ancestral unification of the living and the dead, where the latter activate their presence in the texts as ghosts, or spectral figures. This prosopoeic reformulation of death, a result of a pantheistic worldview, avoids the postulation of a transcendent faith, and instead of it relies on an immanence that only affects the speaker´s clan of ancestors in the early works of Barquero. In his latest works this particular situation assumes a universal dimension. The reading hypothesis, which proposes an epistemic reworking about death in Barquero, is justified as a result of the theoretical combination of poetic rationality established by María Zambrano and the founding character that Gianni Vattimo gives to poetry, together with the resemantization of the death posed by Emmanuel Lévinas.