America from North to South: Poems by an American nomad - Poemas De Hugo Noël Santander

From North to South America, Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira unfolds a poetics of uprooting and resistance, a map of scars where the sacred and the earthly, exile and belonging, judgment and redemption intertwine. This book is not just a physical journey across the continent, but a spiritual and political odyssey written with the ink of memory and the blood of experience. Santander Ferreira does not write from a distance; he inhabits poetry, suffers it, transforms it into testimony and secular prayer.
From the first verses, the poet immerses us in a liturgy of absence and promise:

Let us meditate on our promised day,
A day of nothing-no he, no she, no you, no me,

The promise, in this collection of poems, is a heartbreaking paradox: the longed-for day is also an emptiness. However, it is in that emptiness that the author finds the raw material for his song. In Simón del desierto, the poet rises like an ascetic on the tower of his own solitude:

High on thy Syrian tower, stern and bare,
Thy flesh bore pain, thy soul didst upward stare.
The centuries' slow march thou didst behold,

Poetry then becomes a column from which the pain of the world is contemplated without abdicating one's own. Santander Ferreira assumes the role of prophet, but also that of a martyr of his time.
Intertextuality here is an act of filiation. Hamlet, Don Quijote, and Candelario Obeso are not erudite citations, but sister voices in the construction of a personal mythology. By declaring:

Thus I was Hamlet, and thus I will die:
Apostle of the theater that is life,

the poet inscribes himself in a genealogy of broken beings, heroic in their fragility. And when he quotes Obeso:

Why do you insist to see my skin
as the color of ink? Do you also
believe that my soul is black?

he resists through language and denounces the grammar of racism that still persists in "the social prejudices that are Colombia today."
Language in América de Norte a Sur is not a neutral vehicle: it is a battlefield. The fracture between languages and cultures is also an emotional rift, as the poet confesses:

Language opened a gap between us,
A mutual void that only kisses healed.