The Mirrors of the Pandemic

The Mirrors of the Pandemic gathers Leyla Margarita Tobías Buelvas's poetry around a conviction that gives unity to love, childhood, psychological experience, family, memory and faith: life possesses meaning, and the human being can discover that meaning through gratitude, compassion and hope. The pandemic provided the historical moment in which many of these poems were recovered, organised and brought together. It also gave the collection its central metaphor. Suddenly deprived of the certainties and routines that seemed permanent, human beings found themselves before a mirror. The experience invited a renewed understanding of family, work, love, mortality and the value of being alive. Leyla's answer is faith: faith in the continuity of existence, in the spiritual dimension of the human being and in life as a process of learning. This perspective allows the poems to contemplate everyday happiness with the same seriousness traditionally reserved for extraordinary events. A childhood memory, a family meal, an afternoon with her husband, an animal sleeping nearby, rain beyond a window or the recollection of those who have departed becomes evidence of the richness contained in ordinary existence. Gratitude consequently occupies a central place in the collection. Childhood provides its first school. The poet returns to the wonder, trust and simplicity of her early years and discovers there an attitude that continues throughout adult life: the capacity to recognise happiness while it is being lived. Married love develops the same principle through companionship, conversation, shared work and the construction of a life between two people. A distinctive dimension of the book arises from Leyla's profession as a clinical psychologist. The Masks of Depression transforms years of listening to patients into a gallery of human portraits. Irma, Fidelia, Gerardo, Josefa, Norma, Ricardo, Emanuela and other figures enter poetry through their individual stories. The clinical encounter becomes an act of attention: each person is approached in his or her singular humanity, and poetry gives lasting form to experiences that might otherwise remain confined to the consulting room. Psychology and poetry thus meet in their common interest in the inner life. The psychologist listens to experience; the poet discovers its image, rhythm and meaning. Depression, grief, abandonment, anxiety, memory and hope become ways of entering the complexity of consciousness and recognising the dignity of another person's existence. Nature accompanies this exploration. Animals, trees, rain, streams, fruits, birds, gardens and the sea belong to a world experienced through affection and remembrance. They connect childhood with adulthood and individual memory with the larger continuity of life. The Mirrors of the Pandemic ultimately proposes an art of living founded upon attention: attention to those we love, to those who entrust us with their stories, to the happiness contained in daily existence and to the spiritual reality that gives those experiences continuity. Psychology becomes compassion, memory becomes gratitude, married love becomes companionship, and faith gives each of them a place within a meaningful universe. These are poems written from the certainty that to live is already an extraordinary gift-and that learning to recognise that gift is one of the deepest forms of happiness.