In this new normality that only the surname retains from the old one, the beautiful summer to which Family sang has started to get ugly. Threatened by the unpredictable sprouts, enjoying the summer season becomes a voluntary exercise and a dedication not without risk. However, whether they choose sea or mountain or prefer to stay at home, one of the few activities one hundred percent covid free is reading, which reminds us of the summer leisure liturgy in those days when a mask was a foreign body and the sanitizing gel was the heritage of chronic apprehensive or hypochondria-prone tourists. We will talk about the mental prophylaxis that poetry provides. At the moment, there are some suggestions for camping in the wide province of the verse.
Millennium Mambo
If editorial adventures always have something of a quixotic enterprise, these days they acquire the status of Homeric heroicity. The poetry collection of the publisher Milenio, directed by Àngels Marzo and Josep M. Rodríguez, begins its journey with two dazzling titles: the book by haikus Un gramo menos , by Vicente Gallego, and the bilingual anthology Galician-Castilian A full shed of suspicious meanings , by Yolanda Castaño. Despite its disclosure in our lyrics, haiku is often the poor relative of a strophic tradition that still owes more loyalty to Garcilaso's sonone jail than to Bashō's metric bars. This circumstance causes that the volumes devoted to this stanza are often considered minor books, condemned to swell the complete leftovers of canonical names. Fortunately, this is not the case of Vicente Gallego: in fact, the tendency to encapsulate wisdom sentencing or contemplative epiphany in verses of minimalist packaging guides the search for recent titles such as Saber de crillos (2015) or A birds and crumbs (2019). The flight of the goldfinches and the crumbs that the sparrows dispute reappear in an essentialist work that pays tribute to friends (the late Antonio Cabrera) and teachers (Francisco Brines), looks out into the domestic landscape (“Pull the cable / clothesline and comes / to me the dawn "), submerges in the childish evocation (" With pajamas / we prayed to a god / who was another toddler ") or gives us an existential pinch under the customary smoothness (" Half-open door: / photos of each grandson / mocho and bleach ”). The metaphorical association and attention to nuance make this One gram less one of the most recommended books to access the creative universe of its author.
Preceded by a brief and bubbly prologue signed by Adam Zagajewski, the anthology Un shed full of suspicious meanings , by Yolanda Castaño, offers a journey through a trajectory in which titles such as Depth of Field (2009) or The Second Language (2014) stand out. . Without dividing sections or indication of the origin of the texts, this anthology aspires to be read not as a compilation of great successes, but as a self-contained installment in which the central theme of a clearly outlined poetics from its beginnings unfolds: reciprocal solidarity between body and language, two faces of an identity that is defined by its belonging to an unruly female genealogy and by its defense of a rebellious language, as read in 'La palabra Galicia' (“To tell you where I come from, / I have to stick my tongue out at you ”). If, as Virgilio affirmed, fortune helps the bold, we wish this newly inaugurated Millennium a long life and good luck.
Dig up the ax
Isabel Pérez Montalbán has obtained the Ciudad de Melilla Award with Viking (Visor), which perfectly exemplifies a critical program in which class consciousness and an intertextuality that gives poetry a choral dimension coexist. Both elements leave an introductory note that specifies that "The Vikings is a poor, working-class and marginal area" of the author's native Córdoba. From this biographical key, a book must be interpreted in which the environmental sordidness is reflected through a lexicon of expressionist nerve and hallucinatory overtones. Family violence, the perpetuation of injustice or the description of the slums of misery are at the base of an interpellative verse that combines combative denunciation and moral dignity. The collapse of a simulation-prone civilization, “between substitute and polyester”, is subordinated to a political agenda that includes opposition to evictions and exposure of global massacres, the declaration of war on the financial dictatorship and the fight in favor of environmental commitment, the subject of Spain and the management of a systemic crisis against which little can be done by the soothing love. More convincing when she unearths the ax of her experience as a Viking than when she elevates the schemes of social realism on a planetary scale, Pérez Montalbán must be recognized for the merit of cultivating an uncomfortable writing that attests to a world that is badly done and. badly said.
Raw
Under the title of Manriqueña resonances, Da pain (La Bella Varsovia), by Pilar Adón, also welcomes an iconography with an expressionist texture. However, the collective warp is replaced here by a ritual invocation: that of a duel that is both a private exorcism and an exercise in memory ("We all cry for someone. It is time for all of us"). Between verbal biting and eschatological virulence, Adón claims her “status as a permeable daughter” to reconstruct a mosaic where the memory of the parents alternates with the respective roles assigned to men and women in the family sphere, or with the healing role attributed to the word. The meticulous record of the medical care required by the illness of their elders and the moral contradictions of those who are compelled to assume the role of caregiver end up becoming, beyond the assimilation of the loss, a lesson on the revolutionary value of compassion. Far from palliative self-help, the conquest of Adón consists of expressing raw pain through a discourse that does not adhere to the vertebrae of syntax, threads images of an irrational stamp or articulates itself as a confusion of consciousness that readers do not they will come out unscathed.
The reissue of 'Las moras agraces', by the ill-fated Carmen Jodra Davo, rescues a youth notebook from the author
Likewise, La Bella Varsovia has gone to the pertinent rescue of Las moras agraces (1999), by the ill-fated Carmen Jodra Davo (1980-2019), which is now complemented by 10 tenths of a youth notebook entitled Hecatombe . The ease in recycling Greco-Latin and Baroque literary sources, as well as the personality of a voice in whose modulation a certain generational sensitivity was appreciated, launched the author towards a lyrical stardom from which she decided to get off and on. All in all, his status as a Bartleby poet - he would only publish later Rincones sucios (2004), which was very limited until its reissue on the same label that has recovered his older sister - should not distract us from what really matters: the unusual expressive wisdom of a first film that preserves the freshness of the new and the evergreen of the classic.
SEARCH ONLINE 'ONE GRAMM LESS'
Author: Vicente Gallego.
Publisher: Milenio, 2020.
Format: softcover (112 pages, 13 euros).
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SEARCH ONLINE 'A SHELTER FULL OF SUSPICIOUS MEANINGS'
Author: Yolanda Castaño.
Publisher: Milenio, 2020.
Format: softcover (158 pages, 14 euros).
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SEARCH ONLINE 'VIKINGA'
Author: Isabel Pérez Montalbán.
Publisher: Visor, 2020.
Format: softcover (92 pages, 12 euros).
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SEARCH ONLINE 'DA DOLOR'
Author: Pilar Adón.
Publisher: La Bella Varsovia, 2020.
Format: soft cover (76 pages, 10.90 euros).
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SEARCH ONLINE 'LAS MORAS AGRACES'
Author: Carmen Jodra Davo.
Publisher: La Bella Varsovia, 2020.
Format: softcover (92 pages, 12 euros).
Find it in your bookstore
