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Ronny Ramirez | I condemn the night and its hunting dogs | Road Map Collection | 72 pages | 400 DOP

I condemn the night and its hunting dogs. Three parts. Three books. Three poets. Contradictory or complementary? Let's start with the main title: Condemn. Night. Their dogs. Hunting. From this title, we assume that in Ronny Ramirez's debut work we will find condemnations of a Night that must not be the night familiar to us, nor its hunting dogs. However, despite having imposed from the title a poetic self that comes to settle scores, the poet disconcerts us immediately with the first subtitle: Dreams from my cubicle. And we wonder, what does a poet who condemns the Night and its hunting dogs dream of from his cubicle? In this first part, composed of 10 poems, we sense a first game of deception; is it a dichotomy in the mind of the poet or the poetic self?
In the first poem, Anniversary:

Automaton of cubicle dunce, shirt and schedule...
Disposable piece of public gear, carbon paper.
In your head only the rumour of burning money resounds...
And you mumble the mantra of the puppeteer...

We see a furious and disappointed poet, who uses the second person as a whip to vituperate, self-punish, with a series of unsympathetic reproaches to himself, then closes the poem with timorous remorse:

...Sometimes I would like to lose myself in pages
of a journey between the lines...
to discover a latent and unique truth
in my wife's eyes.
But beauty does not matter as much
as the fortnight and the fatigue.

The consolation offered by the poet is resignation. He is someone who shows the sore and then covers it up so that it suppurates rather than heals. After all, "we must take care of the rumour of money burning, earn the weight." He prefers to sacrifice the beauty of his wife's eyes for the fortnight and fatigue. Modern man at last. Slave to work and money. Thus, the poet invites us to cowardice, to accept a system rotten to the bone, as long as the fortnight saves us and keeps us cfree from the chains of slavery.

In the second poem, reproaches follow, accompanied by a sour melancholy,

No tears thunder
with so much weight on the earth...
I open my eyes, and over me turn
the black jaws of the world.

The third poem is all self-pity. He first speaks of his current misfortune as an office worker and then recalls his time at his mother's house as an excuse to justify his continued slump.

...and cried out of spite...
...and I know the terror of dawning as a parasite.

The poetic self goes from being a parasite at his mother's house to being another office parasite. He sacrifices his freedom for a piece of bread:

...and repeat how grateful I am for the right to be able to eat.

How can it be called a right when this same right is violated? Is it sarcasm, irony?

Ronny Ramírez (Dominican Republic, 1994). Poet, essayist and narrator. Bachelor of Arts from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD). He has published the poetry book Condeno la noche y sus perros de caza (Luna Insomne Editores, Dominican Republic, 2024), and Parque Solitario (Editorial "La Chifurnia", EL Salvador, 2025). He writes a cultural column in the newspaper Acento and has published articles in the Dominican media Listín Diario, Hoy and Diario Libre; essays and poems in national and international magazines. In 2023, he was selected by UNESCO to participate in literature and publishing courses in Havana, Cuba. He participates on a recurring basis in literary activities at the International Book Fair of Santo Domingo (FILSD), the Cultural Center of Spain Santo Domingo (CCESD) and the Banreservas Cultural Center. He has won awards and mentions in competitions such as the Pedro Peix Young Short Story Prize 2020, the Max Henríquez Ureña Young Essay Prize 2021 (International Book Fair of Santo Domingo); the International Short Story Contest 2021 (Casa de Teatro); and the I Latin American Literature Today (LALT) 2023 Review Contest.

He curses the weariness of having to swallow every one of his dreams, yet, at the same time, he also swallows the filth of the system, quietly and meekly, simple as a tenacious factory worker. So far, we can deduce that this condemnation, proposed by the poet in the title, is nothing more than pain, self-pity and an acrid resilience, embellished by such beautiful verses, achieving a high density of meaning with a sober and controlled resource, but without a trace of condemnation - or should that be self-condemnation? Mind you, the hunting dogs appear implicit under a third person plural:

They tell me that working is a blessing...
They tell me as if they were giving me the knife
to tear the skin off...

Poem four, Companions, breaks off a bit and the poetic self begins to point more explicitly to something that could be those hunting dogs. However, the condescension with which he does so lacks the determination of the book's title.

Between coffee and payday
we celebrate life's reckoning and its setbacks.
Suddenly and without warning I notice that you take up almost my entire watch
and we come to trust-sometimes-
the rawest, most gratifying and unexpected dreams.
...
But I know that, as in the open sea, 
in the din of the office
no tears or laughter
will matter
when we are turned to the eye of the hurricane.
Each one will watch for his shore
and will not return for whoever shouts over the roar of the waves.

The poet points with his index finger at the treachery of colleagues. It is, like the others, a beautiful poem, but superior. It is reminiscent of Amistad a lo largo, by Jaime Gil de Biedma: rhythm, construction, aesthetics, the poetic self gains confidence: it does not condemn, it repels, but only before the companions. If the companions are part of the hunting dogs, where is the Night? We had intuited it in the first poem with the mention of "Puppeteer": and you muse the mantra of the puppeteer...and again in the poem I dream of a house:

I hope the bank smiles at me again
and releases its pack of rats

Here the bank has two functions: the first is explicit in the verse that follows, and one could even exchange pack of rats for hunting dogs; and the second, as saviour, and the poetic self becomes a beggar, who expects the bank to do him favours, even though he knows it will charge him extortionately. While the poetic self's resentment and anger towards the capitalist system is noticeable, he does not criticize it. He prefers to remain in his role of victim, and confirms this in the last two lines:

I must sign a death pact and smile
because a house will finally be in my name.

The poet could have made these two lines a question, or even have said "so that a house will be...", but instead of questioning what he must do, he states that it is what he will do, because in doing so, the house will at last be....

In this first part of the book, if we think that the poetic self is the author himself, describing his misfortune, we will not see a poet who condemns or criticises the system in a forceful and severe way, but a poet who mourns that misfortune, assumes it and accepts it, compromising. His vindication is not an intention to change the system, but simply a need to complain because, in the end, complaints alleviate pain. And so the poet would waste a sheaf of paper, so costly to the trees.

But..., what if we detach the author from the poetic "I"? what if, for a moment, we think that the poetic voice of the first part of the book is the voice of Dominican society, of Dominican youth, hiding their rage and disillusionment in beer bottles at weekends and vomiting them in the arms of a psychoanalyst, keeping quiet, resilient and compromising, with no critical conscience of a system of government in office...? What if the poet's goal was to put himself in the shoes of his compatriots and reflect the apathetic character of a generation, the reflection of a society he has to suffer? Because the way the poetic self deforms the daily reality to highlight its alienation, the dehumanising routine of salaried work -a palpable reality for thousands of people in the Caribbean and Latin America- is not gratuitous. This poetic self could be read as a collective voice, a symbol of the trapped citizen. It would not be simply a narrator, but a conscience torn by routine. He knows he is trapped, he questions his existence, recognises that he is alienated, but also dreams: sometimes I would like to lose myself in pages of a journey between the lines... I dream of a house... In its most bitter vein, we feel a trace of Mario Benedetti, even a Kafkaesque touch in the reference to life as a bureaucratic and manipulable piece. The poems convey work-related alienation, routine, the weight of the economic system and the loss of the meaning of personal life in the face of the demands of work.

The latent irony of the poems confirms this intention of the poet, in Aniversario, for example, in Sueño con una casa, and perhaps here alone, in this poem, lies the contradiction we have suspected above, in the fact that that majority to whom the poetic self intends to give voice cannot always afford to dream of a house where I can hang the moon/ like a Christmas stocking. Otherwise, the message of the first part is clear: to work is not to live, and to live like this is one of the many deaths that befalls the damned of the earth. Beauty, love and truth are displaced by exhaustion, money and survival. Looking at it this way, we could qualify Ronny Ramirez as an important promise both now and for the future of Dominican poetry; a powerful pen, with an ability to capture a lucid portrait of society.

II

If in the first part of the book there is a weeping first person, playing the victim, and a second person full of self-reproach, in the second part the poet sheds that costume and dresses up as the third person, becoming a judge, with a baton that points, denounces and sentences. The poetic self changes his skin, with a codified and symbolic language that borders on the baroque in its overloaded, complex and artificial style, its search for emotion, ornate aesthetic pleasure and exaggeration in the rhetorical figures, with a measured but constant emotional intensity in tone. A third person who plays the role of the sharpshooters who shuffle the destinies, at other times the same complicit and guilty society and, finally, the supportive poet, judge and accuser. It is not a book for readers looking for easy literature - perhaps that is where the title of Jordán Hernández's article comes from: "Condeno la noche y sus perros de caza, un gran libro que no me gusta." (I condemn the night and its hunting dogs, a great book that I don't like.)

Among the 12 texts, only two are in the first person, and one of them, Eslabón, seems to me a kind of letter from the author himself.

In this second part, the Night and its hunting dogs begin to become more visible. In Portrait, for example, in the form of the modern family:

Dad and Mom are only shareholders
...they only get
To share the internet, at most.
...they'll die
Thinking they've had a family

Then, in The Shadows of the Lonely Park -a redundant poem, which should have started at the thirteenth line: Here was stranded/ the laughter of a child who never came home; and the first stanza should have been the end, because when you read the beginning:In other circumstances... up to the line has rumour of mysticism and death, it is the same idea repeated in the last stanza, in fact, it is the same stanza that is repeated from The truth is that there was a time/ where one trusted in the solitude of the landscape, with different words until the end of the poem. So, if that poem had started at Here was stranded/ the laughter of a child who never came home, which is the most powerful line of the poem, and then moved the stanza In other circumstances to the end, joining it with the last stanza, removing the ripostes, it would be a great poem - the Night and its hunting dogs appear in the form of the criminals:

Now parties must be timed 
because near the merry lights 
lurk nocturnal predators.

And in Election Time, in the form of politicians:

Pass the factory candidate
the cardboard messiah
pass the man with a false face
and rodent eyes.

And in Fentanyl Moon, The lady in the yellow dress, in the form of newspapers;

Pregonera of death and discord
who profits from the black roses in the heart
Does it please you to taste the trail of blood
that echoes in the darkness?

In The Mud Heroes, The Rainbow They Found in My Blood, and The Signers, Night and its hunting dogs take on a greater dimension. These three poems are sublime, among the best in the book. In the first, a biting, almost prophetic critique:

Here come those who defile the golden ink
those who fill their mouths with cheers and roses.
Those who impose their shadow
over fire and memory.

And the second:

A group goes about gathering honey from a rainbow
crouched among the mountains
comes filling the bowls of the landscape
with treats of castor.

And the third is a universal poem. This poem connects with the first part of the book and justifies the posture and mood of the victim and weeping poetic self,

There are formalities shadowed
by a tangle of fine perfume
concessions and hemlock-haloed beads....
it is when some peon is placed on the payroll,
the loom and warp are prepared for the story...
Perhaps the neat and flowery man
will assume an honorary quota of guilt...

Social criticism is not propagandist; it is not made only to denounce, but to reveal harsh truths from a broken altar. If this section of the book is guilty of anything, it is of excess, of wanting to say more than necessary, and we have noted this in the poem Las sombras del parque solitario, as well as in La fotografía que rondaba por el suelo, in which these verses that I will mention next should have been eliminated for their futility: 

...
without imagining that they would use that photo

to try to decipher his whereabouts
whose trail would be lost in the diffuse video
of a security camera.

...
The young man does not appear and his phone
does not make so much as a sound. 
...
The young man does not appear and his photo
...
until ...

Already in the third part of the book, we find an advocate poet, who raises awareness, again drops the baton of judge, and the first poem gives us the three most memorable lines of the book:

How many will carry the moon like a cross?
How many corpses have to burn
to decipher the perfume of death?

While the last two remind us of Bob Dylan's Blowing in the wind, I consider them original. The second poem is prophetic. And there we discover that the poet has been telling us about someone throughout the book. In the first part, it is an observant someone, who warns and advises:

Then someone came out with that one day

until someone pulls the lever
and I must return to my desk

Someone whispers to me that the world
owes me nothing but masks
to shut my mouth.

In the second part, that someone is ambiguous, oscillating between a kind of hunting dog who, through its indifference to the facts, becomes an unwitting accomplice: Someone hesitates and whispers that he has seen it/ Someone forgot to take a photograph of that one instant; but it is also sometimes the Night: Someone rushes past on the other side of the court / Because someone-and not a Pennywise- / Must be lurking from the drains/ Someone casts a net of lightning on the horizon./ I fear it will catch the little butterfly: but also, that someone begins to take on its prophetic character at the end of the second part, until he becomes a hope for the poetic self, a saviour, cleanser of society, with "his winnower in hand to cleanse the threshing floor, gather his wheat into the barn and burn the chaff in the eternal fire" (1): I hope that one day someone resolves to snatch you away.../ If, suddenly, someone digs and crawls/ adds up and braids/ a chain of violent/ isolated and hermetic facts.../ Someone will drop a spark in the paper city/ ...it is possible that someone will appear among the ruins/ and begin to sweep in front of a tender and quiet dawn.

(1) Matthew 3:12

A certain someone appears in the last poem of the book who should have been in the second part, which suggests that it is an editor's slip. But the most curious of all these 'someones' is the one who appears already transformed into a man, in the poem El jinete de la tormenta, who, in my opinion, is the messiah announced in the poem Castillo de Naipes. If one separates this text from the book, one would say that it is a simple poem dedicated to the author's own uncle, but within the book, being part of a set of ideas strung together to create a discourse, a Ronnian poetic universe, it cannot be isolated simply because, even if each poem were written at different times, the subconscious is immune to the decay and rust of time. Moreover, the author's meticulous selection of each text is intended for a discursive purpose, whether conscious or not. The poem begins with a sort of response to the last four lines of the poem Castle of Cards:

There is a man, whose blood
was polished by Thor's hammer
...
There is a man, whose sleep
was rocked by the Virgin of Mercy
....
There is a man, whose word
was forged by cherubim and dwarves

This messiah has Scandinavian blood, his sleep was rocked by a Catholic patroness, his words are forged by cherubim and dwarves, and for having tamed the storm that wielded the raging tropic/ to flag the heart of a people in flames, Papa Candelo punishes him with insomnia, and since then, never extinguishes the party of sticks/ that reverberates in his chest. This messiah warrior comes pinned by ayahuascas and lashes out against the onslaught/ of enchanted serpents/ against those that eat away/ "the book of life"...

The words say more than their craftsman intends. And if we try to translate these verses mentioned to characterise this messiah, we see that he is a European man, punished and subdued by an African, and nourished by indigenous substances. A transformed European messiah, Caribbeanized:

Thor and the midnight sickle: combination of Nordic mythology with dreamlike images or of death.

The Virgin of Mercy: imposing Marian symbol in Dominican popular religiosity and in the Caribbean, associated with the redemption of the slaves.

Cherubim and dwarves: figures of the Christian and mythical imaginary that refer to both the divine and the pagan.

Papa Candelo: protector, avenger, symbol of resistance and fire prominent in Dominican voodoo.

Finally, the book should have closed with the poem Renaissance, for its topical theme, explicit in the first two verses, quite memorable:

Awake in a world that delegates its history
to the click of a machine:

It is followed, however, by Elegy for the Captain Who Dreamed, which gives a circularity to the book in terms of the victimised, weeping tone of the poetic self:

How can it dawn
if I am no longer guided by the angel and his golden beads?
How to return to the race of the day
if tears are not enough, the flower is not enough
How to say tomorrow or paradise
in front of the sea
if there are no more than crosses under the sky?

But this victim self has evolved, leaves its passive cloak and rebels, Condemns the night and its hunting dogs.../ plucks roots of sleep.../ and raises a line of fire...

Also by Jhak Valcourt in Literatur.Review: What we keep quiet in the "truck"

The qualitative leaps give the poem a force that makes us feel the rage and weariness of the poetic self for always being passive, reproaching itself for having always denied a retort after falling so many times against the onslaught of the waves.... and one thinks, yes, it's a wonderfully premeditated ending; but no, then comes The Midnight Knight, which seems to me detached from the poetic self we analysed at the end of the first part, that is, all that analysis would fall apart if the poetic self of the last poem is the author himself, who dedicates to us a mea culpa; it's as if he suddenly realised his cowardice and inertia in the face of the cruelty of the world and reproached himself:

And you still ask me why I flip
the coin and bet on poetry?
And you still ask me why I blow
a pinch of sand in the moonlight?

And immediately forgive himself, understanding that the fact of putting his pen at the mercy of words, is in itself an act of resistance:

How to leave the word in the ashtray
and refuse the blessing of its music?
How to engross myself in the paperwork of the day
and burn, in my heart, the wings of verse? 
Maybe I can't save the puppy that
is hurtling happily toward the steel stampede
maybe no one will hear that I cry
for the hijacking of colours
on the palette of history
but, simply, I can't keep quiet while
a flower continues to burn on the asphalt.

And I say it's a mea culpa because the most striking thing about this poem is specifically this line:

They bury another woman because someone
Couldn't keep his fly closed.

which makes us wonder how it is possible that the same poetic self who has written something so heartbreaking is not sensitive enough to understand a certain abortion, in the poem Link:

I keep the opinion of the day in my wallet...
I squeeze it when I am questioned
in the barnyard palestra...
Those around me prepare the artillery,
The wall clears...
Then I nod...
And smile in horror.
I raise my fist for the mother who extinguishes
The stars in her womb...

And here lies the conflict and dichotomy of the poetic self that we had mentioned at the beginning. So we could conclude with that, in the end, the poet never intended to portray society, but to cry out the sorrows that had so long crushed his heart, and then return to his routine. Let's hope we are wrong.