The temper and the figure of Antonio Deltoro were not of an illuminated person, but of an old child who often played a very difficult game in his poems: making poetry a liveable and habitable house.

By Mayco Osiris Ruiz

The death of a poet, experts say, always leaves a void in language. In front of the things he wrote – and if they are authentic they will have the texture of the enduring – the cluster of those he will no longer write rises up, more clearly. Until before February 2018, I thought of the work of Antonio Deltoro as an itinerary that still had a long way to go; a stretch that would grow even a little more if he walked through it with that slowness that became a principle of his art, his preferred way of being surprised by that world in which he was interested, more than grasping the mystery, reaching to welcome its wonder.

A few days before his accident, I accompanied him on his way through Xalapa, where he had arrived with Marta, his wife, and the poet Juan Carlos Abril. In the midst of that festive mood in which he spent his entire stay, he told me, between joking and honest, that he was a little worried about what I was going to say about his book (a few months ago he invited me to present it at the book fair at the Palacio of Mining) and to tell him if my reading was favorable or adverse. I replied that I had nothing but admiration for him and his work, and that my text, apart from affection, pay homage to him in almost everything, except for one thing. In which one?, he asked me intrigued. You’ll find out, I said gravely, and after looking at each other and laughing, we both concentrated on our separate plates of arroz a tumbada.

That objection, which he did not come to know and which the poet Adán Brand (his other presenter) also had, was towards a certain tone or air of farewell that continues in the pages of Rumiantes y fieras (2017) as a reminder of the clairvoyance that attends to poets and which, from time to time, is fulfilled in unfortunately literal ways. From then to date, I had to get used to thinking of his work as a fact truncated before its time by designs just as mysterious as those of poetry. A work, however, that knew how to reach its maturity many years ago –perhaps from the pages of Balanza de sombras (1997), where his eagerness for slowness is rounded off– and that, in that sense, he did nothing but pause, thin out his voice until silence. Today, when he has left us, he can continue alone his task of being for us «like a bas-relief in the noise of the times.»

With that and everything, although an undertaking like this is not a small thing, whenever I think of him as a great wise poet, dedicated to forging it, to attending, in all its purity, the Craft and the world, a part of me rebels and tells me that, although he was that and more, his temper and his figure were not of an illuminated person, but of an old child who often played a very difficult game in his poems: making poetry a liveable and habitable house. He knew how to approach the depth from simplicity like no other, «without symbolism / or transcendence», because he gave things their proper dimension and sought to found, here on earth, a paradise, made of the confluence and fraternity of all those beings. –animals or plants, objects, trees, people– that exist and coexist in his books.

I don’t think there is any other proof or better evidence of his triumph than the ease with which his poems manage to reconcile us with the little things, weave, for us, «under the disorder», a space «that everyone does not know» and where we commune in full presence with happiness, with that vitalism that perhaps was his ethics, his morality in the world and in art. As far as I am concerned, in addition to the pages that he bequeathed to us, and as another way of serving and carrying out his ministry, we are left with the patience and dedication with which he taught the legions of young poets for years – and I include myself among them– to understand the keys to his trade from the authority that his height and experience gave him, but without ever imposing his convictions, preaching only freedom, love for beauty and tenacity in the enterprise of stalking it.

It goes without saying that to this is added the deep mark that he left in our literature and that established him as one of the great poets of his time. Wherever he is, he can rest easy, knowing that his work endures in this world as a place that is physical and mental, and that it grows in us like a tree whose branches keep us from fatigue, «from tumult, from promiscuity.»

*Originally published in Letras Libres on May 23, 2023.