Los días sin sus noches

Synopsis

Los días sin sus noches is Raquel Gavilán Párraga's fifth collection and the first she publishes with Durii. It brings together thirty-nine poems arranged in two sections — «Los días» and «Las noches» — that are not opposites but complements: two states of a single body that needs to name itself whole, without trimming away the parts that unsettle. The book opens not with a manifesto but with a domestic gesture: a woman hangs sheets in the sun in «Sudario de sol», and in that seemingly small act the entire image system of the collection unfolds — fire transformed into goddess, the feminine genealogy that speaks through the body, the domestic elevated to sacred ground. From there, «Los días» explores desire without euphemism or embarrassment, in poems such as «Loba» and «A este lado de tu piel», where the female body asserts itself as a legitimate, animal force. Motherhood appears without the usual filter of tenderness: «Yo, madre» and «Otro tipo de silencio» address exhaustion, invisibility and the mental load with a candour seldom found in poetry about raising children. The section closes with «Él», the most political poem in the book — a meditation on patriarchy as a system lodged in the bodies and language of all women, not as a particular man but as an invisible, persistent structure. «Las noches» shifts register: absence, lost love and fear take over from the light. Domestic objects — a cup, a chair, a lamp — hold the memory of whoever is no longer there, as in «Lluvia en una casa vacía». Mirrors return painful versions of the self («La piel y el espejo»), and writing becomes an act of resistance against imposed silence («De piedra y de tinta»). The section — and the book as a whole — ends with «El monstruo bajo mi cama», the longest poem in the collection: an allegory that borrows the language of the children's horror story to name domestic violence from the inside. No metaphor softens what is told; instead, there is the courage to tell it in the words of someone who has lived it. Throughout the collection, Gavilán builds a coherent image system — fire and water as opposing and complementary forces, the body as a map of the unspoken, the house as the space where love and fear coexist — that makes the book an organic whole rather than a loose gathering of individual poems. The result is a collection that does not seek to console from a safe distance but to accompany from within: a book that begins in the light of an everyday gesture and ends in the dark of a real fear, on the understanding that only by naming both — the days and their nights — can either be overcome.

Machine translation, pending review.