America from North to South: Poems by an American Nomad, by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira. Foreword by Leyla Margarita Tobías Buelvas

America from North to South: Poems by an American Nomad, by Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira, opens a territory of consciousness by presenting the labours of humble work in their poetic, ethical, and spiritual dimension. The reader explores a plural mirror in which contemporary uprootedness takes on form, awareness, and language. The Harrods Poems and America from South to North form a single narrative and symbolic body, organised as journey, memory, and affirmation. Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira writes from movement, from work, from culture, and from a life embraced with attention and study; from an existence crossed by geographies, languages, trades, traditions, and human bonds. The word arises here as the result of a lived transhumance that becomes lyric and, through its sensitive images, an act of human restoration.

This volume belongs to a larger project subtitled Poems of an American Nomad. Its first volume, America from North to South, traced an initial cartography of the continent as historical, cultural, amorous, and spiritual experience. This second volume broadens and completes that journey. The route is reversed, the horizon expands, and consciousness becomes more cosmopolitan. The American nomad returns, observes, integrates, and formulates a mature vision of the contemporary world, now incorporating exile, migrant labour, contact with other civilisations, and philosophical and spiritual reflection as central dimensions of the journey.

The Harrods Poems occupy the experiential core of the book. Harrods is the emblem of the working world: a space where commerce, beauty, discipline, surveillance, desire, and sustained human effort converge. In its corridors, storerooms, and demanding rhythms, the poet develops an attentive gaze that observes in depth the functioning of the system and the condition of those who sustain it with their bodies, their time, and their watchfulness. This poetry arises from an awakened consciousness, formed in direct experience as a warehouse supervisor, and expressed with aesthetic and ethical rigour. Work becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes poetic memory.

This book affirms that dignity belongs to the human being as essence. The job function, the uniform, the shift, the wage, daily repetition, and surveillance are integrated into a broader vision in which consciousness, culture, and sensitivity constitute the true centre. Everyday work is revealed as a space of inner learning, and writing as an exercise of fidelity to one’s own life. The body appears as the place where contemporary history is inscribed, and poetry preserves that inscription as conscious testimony.

In Cane Fields Varnished with Concrete, the poet traces a moral geography of the urban world. The modern city appears as a territory of memory and affection, where love, loss, and hope coexist with asphalt. The poem declares:

Today I walked the ruined streets

of this city that still bears our wound,

seeking in corners and façades

the joy that, in your embrace, was my torch

Memory is a territory conquered by the word. London is configured as a new Carthage, a centre of consumption and a stage for historical learning. The imperial city is integrated into a symbolic reading that links past and present, affection and structure, body and architecture. Its streets, parks, libraries, theatres, and rhythms accompany an inner process in which walking, working, reading, and remembering form one and the same creative gesture.

In Elegy of the Invisible Academic, the book clearly exposes the tension between knowledge and social recognition. The poem states:

My superiors never addressed me

with a word beyond what was ordered,

they did not even look me in the eyes,

though they knew of my academic training

We share one of the book’s central experiences: the distance between inner knowledge and its valuation within the institutional machinery. Personal experience becomes critical consciousness and an affirmation of intellectual dignity, integrating the academic experience into a deep reflection on the place of thought in contemporary society.

Shakespeare Confessing His Verses to Me builds one of the most powerful images in the collection: the double consciousness of the intellectual worker. The poet writes:

And so my mind read through my ears

while my arms folded clothes.

The frivolity of fashion became tolerable

with the Brontë sisters and their lovers

Literature is an active presence and an inner discipline. Reading becomes a daily gesture that accompanies manual labour and transforms the workplace into a territory of creation. The word sustains, orders, and elevates everyday experience, integrating body and thought in a single vital act.

In The True Pariahs of This Earth, the book develops a direct critique of the morality of contemporary capital, dismantling its ethical disguises and its rhetoric of success. The poem affirms:

To be wealthy is to steal what belongs to others,

to live behind the disguise of opulence,

to boast and believe the boasts,

to offer help only if it yields a return

Poetry becomes moral judgement and an exercise in lucidity, placing human dignity above any material accumulation.

The testimonial dimension reaches particular intensity in Workplace Accident, where labour experience is narrated with almost documentary precision. The poem records:

The thirty-first of August stretches

into midnight; it is the finale.

They order us to rearrange the shops

with dismantled steel shelving

The worker’s body appears as the place where contemporary history is inscribed. Writing preserves that experience as living memory, integrating effort and consciousness into a poetic form that dignifies what was lived.

The Stooping Willow stands as one of the book’s great symbolic nuclei. The poet contemplates nature amid the urban environment and writes:

Beautiful rises the skeletal willow

hibernating by the bridge’s edge,

and I lingered, contemplating it—

I will not arrive punctually at my work

Contemplation manifests as a form of aesthetic affirmation. Beauty appears as a conscious gesture that gives meaning to time and movement, integrating nature and city into a single poetic experience.

In Self-Portrait at Twenty, the book reveals its deepest ethical core. The poet declares:

That is why I sing the mud, not glory,

for silence gives vice a memory.

Writing and reading are the soul’s cure,

in filthy streets, minds that crawl

Here a poetics of inner fidelity is formulated, where writing and reading appear as practices of care for the soul and as paths of ethical formation. Youth is presented as a space of early consciousness, capable of choosing depth over fleeting shine.

From this experiential nucleus, the book expands towards its second great movement: America from South to North, written after the poet’s return from the Anglophone world to Colombia in 2006. The journey shifts from the urban-labour space towards a cultural, philosophical, and spiritual crossing. The poet’s memory now spans continents, creeds, languages, and traditions, integrating those experiences into a broad vision of Being. America, Europe, and Asia appear as stations of a single human apprenticeship.

In this second block, the poetic voice formulates a meditation on identity, belonging, and meaning. Life appears as shared competition and collective march, observed with ethical attention and symbolic depth. The opening poem affirms:

Every man and woman at last walks on.

No one dares to look to the side.

Like a slave who fears the stars,

I follow a step behind, far lagging.

Reflection is also articulated around contemporary thought, as in E. Sanders’s Sociology, where institutional life appears as a mould of collective consciousness:

A bureaucratic and constant smell

invades the private and the sacred.

The Company trains our conscience

to think without love about life.

In E. Sanders’s Teleology, the poet links ethics, history, and contemporary catastrophe, integrating global experience into a moral reading of the world:

Does Japan not suffer

for having denied its abundance

to peoples who, poor, were failing?

Its treasures were lost in a single day!

The spiritual dimension reaches a celebratory and reflective tone in India, where the poet affirms an integrating vision of creeds and religious experience:

India is a country of allegories.

In the West we love the visible,

we seek the real as appearance,

the form that answers to matter.

Historical memory is powerfully activated in Gorky, where the figure of the writer becomes a symbol of the bond between art, power, and conscience:

Mother was his most burning song,

a cry among chains and rifles,

where love wove rebellions

and the son was the homeland being born.

Reflection on continental identity unfolds in America and Europe, where the poet affirms a mestizo, historical, and spiritual consciousness:

European and indigenous is my brow,

with no fixed name, no nation and no king;

I am the child of a persistent conflict,

of the gold that fled from my ancestors.

The book incorporates family memory as an ethical and affective root. In My Parents’ Efforts, the dignity of honest work is transmitted as legacy, a conflict that is the subject of his award-winning novel Desde el Viaducto (2025). In Mamita Carmen and Of My Great-Grandmother Mercedes, the female genealogy appears as spiritual support and as a transmission of strength, tenderness, and memory.

The journey culminates in a choral affirmation of creeds and cultures in Symphony of Creeds, where East and West are integrated into a unified vision:

From the deep shelter of the Upanishads

and the Bible in sacred revelation,

I heard the voice of God in storm,

His light thundering within the heart.

The subtitle Poems of an American Nomad 2 expresses the architecture of this work. The number two indicates continuity, maturity, and an expansion of consciousness. The first volume traced an initial cartography of the continent; this second integrates exile, migrant labour, dialogue among civilisations, and spiritual reflection as central dimensions of his journeys across the world, in which Bucaramanga flickers like Baghdad in Sinbad’s Travels from The Thousand and One Nights.

Both volumes share a single ethic, a single voice, and the same integrative vocation. Together they form one poetic organism in which movement becomes form and experience becomes knowledge.

This book affirms human dignity as an essential value, honest labour as a space of inner formation, culture as a living dialogue among traditions, and the word as a form of embodied truth.

The Harrods Poems: Poems of an American Nomad 2 thus opens as threshold and map. It invites the reader to travel through a work of universal scope that understands poetry as a path, as an exercise of consciousness, and as an act of human integration.

In these pages, the word becomes home, memory becomes form, and the journey becomes meaning.

— Leyla Margarita Tobías Buelvas

Bucaramanga, 1 January 2026

Download the book free until the 5th of Januaty 2026 at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G73L22K