Reseña del libro "Speak, Woman!: Poems (en Inglés)"
In Speak, Woman! poetry becomes a language of memory, love, feminine identity, psychological healing, family, faith, and belonging. Concerned with emotions and conflicts that cross cultural boundaries, the book brings together the intimate and the social: the woman who speaks about herself also speaks as a daughter, wife, psychologist, reader, traveler, and witness to the lives of other women. Tobías evokes the Caribbean world of her childhood and family alongside the Andean environment in which another stage of her life unfolds. Food, music, streets, beaches, mountains, local customs, Indigenous Zenú heritage, African ancestry, Mediterranean roots, and family history enter the poems naturally, not as picturesque decoration but as elements of identity. At the center of Speak, Woman! is the conviction that writing can transform experience without falsifying it. Tobías draws upon her work as a clinical psychologist and upon her own encounters with grief, rejection, economic uncertainty, prejudice, love, professional vocation, and renewal. Her poetry repeatedly returns to women who have suffered humiliation, abuse, exclusion, or loneliness, but it refuses to make suffering their defining condition. Healing requires recovering the capacity to speak, to understand one’s history, and to recognize dignity even after it has been challenged by others. As she writes in “Writing Is Healing”: The verses are, truly, the balm of time, the ancient alchemy that turns pain into gems. That conception of poetry gives unity to a collection that ranges widely in subject. The death of her father, Juancho Tobías, becomes an elegy not only for a beloved parent but also for a man remembered in Sincelejo for his generosity. Her grandmothers appear as guardians of family memory. Other poems explore the poet’s cultural ancestry, her relationship with Colombian places and traditions, her professional commitment to listening to those in distress, and her belief that empathy can be more powerful than aggression. This understanding of love does not erase the individual woman. On the contrary, the title Speak, Woman! announces the book’s central imperative: a woman must possess the language with which to tell her own story. Tobías writes of women not as an abstract category but through the contradictions of lived experience. Her poems acknowledge tenderness and anger, disappointment and hope, dependence and freedom, age and childhood, mourning and rebirth. The psychologist and the poet frequently meet in the same voice, particularly when she addresses suicide prevention, emotional suffering, self-knowledge, forgiveness, and the recovery of personal agency. Faith provides another dimension of this poetic world. God, Mary, the Creator, forgiveness, and transcendence coexist with meals, bills, pets, family memories, professional difficulties, landscapes, and marital life. Tobías does not establish a boundary between a supposedly elevated spiritual existence and ordinary experience; the sacred is discovered within the life being lived. Speak, Woman! is therefore both an intimate collection and a portrait of a particular feminine consciousness in contemporary Colombia. Its fifty-one poems move from autobiography toward a broader reflection on what women inherit, endure, preserve, question, and transform. Through family remembrance, psychological insight, cultural identity, conjugal love, and spiritual conviction, Leyla Margarita Tobías proposes poetry as an act of recognition: a means by which experience, including painful experience, can be given form and returned to the world as language.
