A very valuable poet who you will hardly see reviewed anywhere

A complete and invaluable collection of lyrical works by a major voice in Catalan literary expression of the last fifty years; an author who had published with Tres i Quatre and Llibres del Mall, prestigious publishing houses that have done immense work in disseminating poetry... Gaspar Jaén Urban (Elche, 1952) presents his lyrical corpus since 1975. We should see him everywhere, giving excellent interviews; literary critics could seize the opportunity to review his work and discuss it extensively; bookstores should be vying to stock this volume... Will any of this happen? I'd bet my left hand it won't. It doesn't matter, but: Guadalajara has loved us!

And yet, not everything is so dark, nor so meager: Pere Ballart, the country's best poetry theorist (and critic), heads this work with a sixty-page text that, simply to avoid Byzantine discussions, has been agreed to be called prologueBut it is actually much more than that: it is a meticulously researched book that memorably explores the poetry of the Elx-born author and exhaustively evaluates its evolution. Ballarti's study is magnificent, and, among many other things, it highlights the importance of the "perfect alexandrine," so characteristic of the author, or the ambivalence of Romanticism and Classicism in his verses: the persona that constructs this poetry draws from the Romantic wellspring—the idea of exile, applied to love or to the homeland—the style, the mode, are genuinely Classical—and, as if that weren't enough, one of the central books of the volume, Pontine, from 2000, recovers the figure ofOvid, a poet also marked by exileBallart further points out the two major themes in Gaspar Jaén Urban's poetry: love and the land. It is understood, however, that the poems that reflect on the land (see the splendid Territories, a work from 2003, which clearly defends the linguistic map of our vast people: "A thousand years since the voice of your country began") they do so, always, from the most unyielding love.

The elegy, central to Jaén's work

I had only encountered the poet's work in fragments, and now, beyond simply reading it in chronological order, I have been able to live there for a few weeks. I would almost say that I have become friends with the poet who, in the delightful retreat of his home, sheltered by his orchard (so often evoked, after a barbaric urban plan had annihilated it: see the surprising Will(2012), sees himself as "an angel with bright eyes that did not know how to see." I have admired his pure voice, expressed in the most delicate lyricism: "Because, at dawn, the frost covered / without whispering the skin of the jasmine." I have enjoyed his extreme capacity to appreciate the most subtle modifications: "Will light and darkness continue to change the color of your eyes?" I have pondered, with him, the love that slips away, and—with the sorrow of the reader who recognizes a face in the lyricist—I have admitted that "the mark of oblivion will remain on the walls." Every poet must reflect on time: Gaspar Jaén Urban asks himself "how much time hides behind the years," convinced that what is measured by loss is not the same time with which we celebrate gains.

The sense of elegy, as Ballart points out, becomes central to all of the author's poetry. The poems of Roman remembrance They have led me to think of the Roman elegies Goethean (a similar classical disposition, perhaps). But the elegy applies even more deeply to his birthplace, woven together over the years: "Where else but in my village had I have to die, / to try again to live, wounded by time that kills?" Only writing can mitigate that pain of loss, the profound sorrow of absence: "All love has died within me, without resurrection / on the third day, like beings who cannot bear their breath. / I write it down and it is a remedy. What remedy will I always have / if not writing?" This idea is recurrent: "I always begin the poem / to cure myself of some loneliness." Now the author of these sublime verses gives us the gift of his complete works, meticulously revised. Let us celebrate everything by honoring it as it deserves, which means by reading it!