"Prefiere, para expresarse, el poema extenso escrito en versículos, enriquecido con imágenes que se solazan en el gusto de la gracia y del gozo del mundo en torno. Sin prisa, Becerra trabaja una poesía que empieza a deslizarse hacia temas adonde llegan, como ecos nostálgicos, las sensaciones más diferenciadas, las llamas de deseos que aún perduran en su conciencia."*
Toda su producción poética fue recopilada por José Emilio Pacheco y Gabriel Zaid, en El otoño recorre las islas (Obra poética 1961-1970), Era, México, 1973.
"José Carlos Becerra was born in 1936 in Villahermosa, Tabasco, he died in Italy in 1970. Becerra studied philosophy and architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and in 1969 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship which enabled him to travel first to New York and later to London, where he spent six months. In 1970 he visited several European countries; as he went from Naples to cross the peninsula and take the boat that would lead him to Greece, he lost control of the car he was driving and was killed. He was thirty-three.
His poetic work is extensive and was collected posthumously in El otoño recorre las islas [1973, edited by José Emilio Pacheco and Gabriel Zaid], due to the efforts of those who furnished material and especially to those who worked arduously gathering his published as well as his unpublished poems.
His poetry is a maelstrom of surprises which abundantly celebrates his life and death. In shaded and hidden signs he rejoices in the influences he assimilated so well: traces of romanticism that embrace the Nerudian and junglelike earthiness of Pellicer under an exuberant geography of solar light; echoes of Claudel and tones of Perse whispering under the intellectual light of Villaurrutia, Gorostiza, Paz… all in long poems filled with nostalgia, memory, sensuality, certainty and doubt: mirror and dream celebrations.
His sudden stop and change of lane are surprising — a transition to less discursive poems, short texts that mark an expressive search and transcendental pursuit replete with elements of humor, at times of bitterness and even of sarcasm.
The premonitory sign of his death is also surprising: a reiteration between the lines, an open prediction. The question is posed: was he his own visionary?
The myth is invented by him, as he makes life and death coexist in a written celebration which once again surprises, even with regard to what he did not accomplish due to his untimely death which surprised him, or did it not?"*
The translations here presented, by Linda Sheer, come from Poetry in Transition: Mexican Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Linda Sheer and Miguel Florez Ramírez, Translation Press, Ann Arbor, 1984.