Manifestations of the Divine in Marta Márquez's Attempts. A Dialogue Between Poetry, Politics and Religion

Abstract

In the present work I propose a first approach to Attempts (in Spanish: Intentos), collection of poems of the Buenos Aires’ writer Marta Márquez, published in 2013. Notions such as heterodoxy, marginality and decentering are very productive to activate the meanings and tensions of a text in which the poetic, political and theological concerns coexist and dialogue in unconventional ways, difficult to typecast. The reflection on the divine is manifested in the poems of Marta Márquez with an evident centrality but are always alternative and dissident. The God of the Christian tradition is a constant figure in the work but is never a utilitarian, simplistic, ritualistic or dogmatic presence. I will try here to offer a general mapping of these manifestations of the divine through some of the searches that appear repeatedly in the book; the keys on which I will build my analysis are the tiny, the doubt, the word, the others and the struggle. The poet discovers, in each of these manifestations, the presence of the divine sneaking in reality and altering the status quo and the fixed definitions.