It is sad to be only a void inside the heart

The concern for what can (still) be said is at the heart of this beautiful book, winner of the latest edition of the Carles Riba prize –the first held on a new date–. Let's look at the poem that opens the proceedings, Picking Cherries. The pretext, like most of the pretexts in the poetry of Jaume Coll Mariné (how welcome that is!), comes from country life, from a family coexistence with nature: in this case, a ladder propped against the trunk of a cherry tree, which has remained there after the harvest, done months before. That ladder, which at an inopportune time no longer serves any purpose, “I wish it would mean something.” Perhaps like poetry. Further on, we find a poem of a more ideological nature –which, in the final notes, the author acknowledges as “an attempt to read some of the ways of doing of [Pere] Gimferrer.” It repeats the verse five times: “We no longer know what to call it.” And it is done to insist on all that is falling apart for us: “Nothing is more rotten today / than walking with the name of Spain”; and, a few verses later: “All of Catalonia is a shell / a cracked husk / Nothing is more rotten today.”

The reflection on what can be said, then, is essential here. And, using very varied pretexts, we find in many of the verses the question –which ends up being rhetorical: an affirmation– about the value of poetic expression, about this search that, to so many of our neighbours, may seem like little more than a ladder propped against a cherry tree some time after someone climbed it to reach the fruit. “We don't know what you're looking for. / I don't know. I wouldn't know how to say it either.” The act of saying that rivals silence (or becomes its friend): “And that so thick silence / that I didn't know what to do with it / nor if I should do anything with it” (Ballad). In another composition, a child is mesmerized by a sparrow trapped in a kitchen bell until its mother manages to free it from the domestic snare. And the boy, like the one in Jacques Prévert's poetry, follows its free flight: “And you turned, / to tell me something you couldn't say.” Herein lies the mystery of poetry (and, consubstantially, its inexhaustible search for meaning): all these things that cannot be fully said, or that we don't know how to formulate, are worth saying.

A coherent and well-crafted work

In the aforementioned final notes, the author admits that this “little book has been written for me, in large part, while I was not writing any book.” His sincerity does him credit. The fact is that it is a work with full coherence, well-crafted, which does not give that so bothersome effect of books that are merely collections of scattered pieces. Anyone who knows the two previous titles by the poet from Muntanyola will not be surprised by the quality of his verses: those of someone who knows his own tradition very well. But not only that: Jaume Coll Mariné cites, among others, Geoffrey Hill or poets from the Chinese tradition. He has read Maragall, Carner and Ferrater well (and the so forgotten Sagarra!). And Machado or Marçal. In his case, each poem asks for a specific form. Sometimes he can dispense with punctuation, often he uses rhyme. Be that as it may, his verse always has the right tension, it never fades. The “dry oak” of the Chinese poet Han Yu is nothing more than a nuisance (and he cannot expect any miracle from nature, like the Machadian elm): “How sad it is to be just a void within the heart.” Pretexts of admirable effectiveness, then: like the dog that has run away from home or the bitch that a wild boar has killed. Like the single plum from a harvest, which has benefited from “all the sun of a whole year.” Or like the poet of the homonymous piece, whose verses defend, with subtle irony, the tools that tradition provides us.

He sings, yes, the poetry of the man from Osona. For this, the poet uses a diction, often colloquial, which endows his verses with a rich naturalness (pro, brenar, senglans, set –participle of ser–, this di’ns-e we have just seen, con –when–). He sings and knows very well what to say. And even more: how to say it to move us.