En el brocal del tiempo

This anthology entitled En el brocal del pozo brings together the essence of the poetry of Juana Castro, whose career began in 1978. Her work occupies an indisputable place in Spanish poetry where the feminine tangentially affects her entire career as a writer. The feminist conscience is shown with metaphors of an unusual delicacy. For more than thirty years Juana Castro has frequented a single theme, modulating it according to the time in which it was written: the experience of being a woman from different perspectives and symbolizations, always in contravention of patriarchal culture. In that territory she is unique, which is why her poetry is the object of study in prestigious North American universities. The critic John C. Wilcox has rightly written in an essay on her poetry that the author offers us the intra-history of the illiterate woman of the late s. XIX and beginning of the XX. In the fusion between the historical and the biological, the woman feels less modesty in approaching a self that looks very closely and not precisely so that the mirror returns an enlarged image of her perplexity. The recurring themes of Juana Castro's poetry are rural life, love as a source of pleasure, the idealization of female bodies, the loss of loved ones such as that of her son, her parents' Alzheimer's disease, and the fight for woman against patriarchal society.