Can there be joy in forgetting?

The title is the threshold of a book. And there are thresholds that seem to invite us to enter the work that they head and others that, on the contrary, rather dissuade us. As for the title of Maria Josep Escrivà's new book, I immediately felt that it was inviting me to get to know her verses. Because of the apparent contradiction that this phrase hides: can there be joy in oblivion? Perhaps yes: that of the lover who, finally, feels how the image of the beloved that has so mortified him is disintegrating. Or —and she wrote sophisticated lyrical material— that derived from the unconsciousness of someone who suffers from an illness that darkens his memory.

The poet leaves "in the transparent gelatin that is a book" (this one I present) a few powerful ideas, articulated in the economical beauty of the verse. "There are so many ways to die," we read in the poem. The bees: one of them is through forgetting, the stiffening of language, the progressive darkening of consciousness. The book opposes this loss with an energetic gesture, a proposal made of memorable verses. Faced with the threat of losing the backbone —"a very thin focus," "a milestone"—, poetry becomes "a raft of words" and an "ikebana of words." Peace not wounded, the finished work that reaffirms meaning. Unlike death, which is inevitable, "love is a mirage." Strong ideas.

For all this, The joy of forgetting proposes to the reader a profound reflection on language and on the possession of the world that language assures us. The compositions of the second part, "Far from who knows what," have a structure that suggests formal fragility, like that of very primrose flowers. But they contain words—not a single capital letter—that are very firm: "man does not seek / the source. // man seeks / in the routine / of the water that aspires / his why." Here is the original meaning: the water that aspires us, already untied from the source that provides it. The greatest fear—the poet affirms—"is to lose / the north: the north / of writing." The verses impose their own blanks on us, which introduce silences that go far beyond caesuras or rhythmic pauses. It is, for example, the silence (that is, the blank) that, in a syntagm, separates the adjective dark from the noun cavern or, even more dramatically, the prefix in- from the name existence, in the phrase that complements the first.

And yet, despite the various deaths that surround us, there is hope in this book. A "red air"—Plum tree after the rain— "has let the light / into my house." Poetic writing stands as a defender of hope: the hope that has not been undone by the thread of memory, of those more remote memories that represent us in all "the joy of the humble," as inhabitants of the "paradise of the humble." The author certifies this in the epilogue, entitled The skein: "Poetry would be in my case a tool to unravel my tangle of contradictions, of opposing feelings, of emotional blockage that translates into verbal blockage" (let us not forget, moreover, that text and weave They share a root). Escrivá has used the tool with great skill and, in doing so, has not stopped conversing, in his verses, with a host of living poets.