A cave against the elements

A favorite Auden poem of Alex Susanna was the elegy in Yeats, where we read that "the words of a dead man/Become the entrails of the living." A severe fate has willed that it is Alex who now must live forever in us, his readers. In the prologue to Body Memory. Complete Poetry (1980-2024) (Viena Edicions, 2025) Jordi Llavina describes it as "the work of a life", but it is much more: it is, as a verse of the poem says Still life (Blind spots, 2007) "a condensation of life." I will not forget that I met Alex Susanna Twenty years ago when he came to the Autonomous University to explain to us that art is neither fantasy nor invention, but the same reality but invigorated, or - to put it memorably as he did - muscular. As if poetry were a gymnasium in which to stretch words that routine has slackened: the place to maximize, condensed, their power.

It is not easy to generalize anything about eleven books written over more than four decades. I see them—without two early titles banished from posthumous editions—as a sequence of attempts (ranging from 1980 to the book that in 1990 won the Carles Riba Prize, The rings of the years), dominated by a nostalgic poetry, entrusted to the idealization of memory. But from Forests and cities (1994) and Gelida Suite (2001), the poet finds a well-rounded book structure, a perfect balance between the lyrical themes that concern him: art, nature and, of course, love - the erotic, the love of children, of friends, of everything that invites us "to squeeze the days like an orange" -. Because those of us who have known him will agree that Susanna's most characteristic attitude to life is, according to Jordi Llavina, "voracity," a passionate and greedy dedication to everything that makes life more alive.

Asking a professor to present a book is taking the risk of having them teach a class. Today's contains up to three lessons, but the teacher in all of them is Susanna. The first is one of experience. Someone whose biography could have defined her as a "Venetian" poet, newest At the last minute, or an epigone of Gil de Biedma, of whom he was a great friend, he traced an undeniably personal path, although from unequivocal premises: those of the so-called poetry of experience. Excluding its "surreal" beginning, Susanna opens the volume with Body memory (from 1980, and with a title so Kavafian) and the poem The keys which, if it shows anything, is that contrary to general opinion, the main theme of this movement is rather the inexperience: "There is no moon to guide you / nor any hidden clarity / that vaguely illuminates you." What was clear was the decision to avoid irrationality and sentimentality, and to base lyrical expression on a perfectly objective reality, shared by all. In an epigraph fromThe last sun (1985), once again the endorsement of WH Auden encourages him to defend the realist option; the Englishman tells him that it is only possible to speak of the world in which "everyone, including scientists, is born, works, loves, hates and dies, [...] the primary world of phenomena as it is", with a heartbreaking final invocation to "the most admirable of Roman deities, the god Termini", as if the cons. In any case, those who, ignorant or malicious, turn a poem of experience into a simple experiential record, would do well to read, for example Fragility (Winter Palace). The poetic self records the love affair with a woman, and as "two not-quite-empty glasses"—one of which will break when he tries to clean it the next day—they are the emblem that anchors the narrative anecdote to a moral judgment, beyond any autobiographical nature. The "glass window" becomes forever in the poem the "fragility of love." In no other way does the (good) poetry of experience elevate an image to what Gil de Biedma called "significant emotion."

The second lesson concerns the poet's discretion. Susanna, as Marie-Claire Zimmermann wrote, is never "either egotistical or selfish," strictly separating the poetic voice from the figure of the public man. Nothing is more illustrative than theethos so different from diaries and poetry collections: the former rationalize everything in short, analytical sentences; the latter depict (often in a single sentence) someone with an intact capacity for surprise at life's twists and turns, devoted to introspection and epiphany. That is why he is, stylistically, the poet of ellipses, the one of a stasis provoked by the mystery of nature, or by the affirmation of life inherent in the most modest everyday acts. The care taken to avoid making the voice sound too forceful or affected is one of its most genuine traits, formally translated into a showy resource. Except for those poems so sensual that it would be strange to delegate them to anyone (emitted from the first-person pronoun), two-thirds of Àlex's poetry are enunciated with a you unfolded or from one usAll so that the experience doesn't feel private, as if it were already being seen from the perspective of someone who will share it.

The final lesson of Body memory teaches the ultimate function of poetry. As Lavina rightly notes, if a word of Susanna's designates the condition of the individual hectic with obligations, it is outdoorCorrelatively, we will say that it is shelter that art can provide us. Chamber music (Blind spots), presents the poet armed with a pencil, a "graphite lead" as a sufficient tool, in the margins of other people's books or in the draft of his own, to search for exactly what Still life (Gelida Suite) is revealingly described as "a cave, any old entrance / where one can escape that excess of exposure." For Susanna, poetry offers, against the unease of life, the illusion of meaning and, above all, a hope of permanence: "a spot of light / that nothing can completely melt." In her first books, the mention of the verb "to" is quite recurrent. shore for referring equally to the help provided by good memories, friendship, reading or love; Useless poetry, of Gelida Suite He will claim that a poem "can act as a crutch / during our forced / moral convalescence."

I end with the memory of an impressive poem byBlind spots which summarizes much of what has been said. A voice-over recreates a unique lived experience: the recording at the Liceu of Xavier Montsalvatge's opera of the same name, with the composer present, shortly before his death. While a violent storm raged outside in Barcelona, ​​the musician saw a work of his performed that reconnected him with his own past. And again the leitmotiv of support: "the head resting on a cane / as if it were a baluster end of time": poems, too, are definitely the "baluster end" that props up our days. In Montsalvatge's opera, a woman converses with the recorded voice of her long-dead husband. Today, a multitude of readers will be able to enter into conversation with the voice-over by Alex Susanna, intact and alive forever, within his poems.