In “Inner Presence,” the only collection of poems published by Mirta Aguirre during the Republican era, the main features of her poetic sensibility and the aesthetic signs that shape her distinctive style converge. As the title itself suggests, intimacy determines her poetic discourse to some extent, although it is articulated in constant contact with the social reality that surrounds it.

The collection of poems is made up of three sections that constitute thematic units that are not independent but are identifiable in terms of topics and some compositional procedures. However, they share a common foundation in terms of the author’s usual symbolic references and this flow from the intimate to the social and vice versa, a cycle that determined a broad framework for her poetry.

The first section has a certain thematic variety; many poetic pieces are imbued with a colloquial tone that sometimes implies dialogic constructions, in which the meaning and symbols of Cuban identity sometimes occupy the first stratum in the reading:

“(…) Leave me alone, my land,
land of mulatto farming,
I am yours, Cuban on loan:
that I am, but you are not mine.
If I had black blood
another rooster would crow (…)”

The second section delves deeper into the intimate, but the lexical playfulness akin to the avant-garde still persists. The fondness for words sometimes borders on purism, as they are stripped of meaning in some of the poems, a fruition of the purely sonic in the construction of the verse. Meanwhile, the love theme now gains a certain force, without losing its simultaneously poignant and restrained emotion.

The third section of the collection of poems is the repository of the climax of the confessional. The poet has traversed various registers, shedding her lyrical vestments throughout the collection of poems to reach the core of herself. However, this discovery does not imply confinement, as has been the case with other intimate poets, and the poet delves from the depths reached in the collective palpitations.

This collection of poems reveals how the poet has managed to tame the rebellious material of language, giving body to both texts within the most classical framework and a lyricism that extends into the verse, especially in the last section. Throughout, however, the truly sentimental aspect is under the aegis of restrained reflection, the root of the lyricism of restrained emotion that many of the poems in this collection convey.