The Spirit of Hope: On Antoni Marí's Latest Book

The poem—because it is a single poem in four cantos: unitary, narrative, of philosophical ambition—begins with the memory of an old family clock, tall and bulky, which for many years had been repudiated by everyone because of the noise of its mechanism: "And I fear that it reminds you of when you are a tree." In the second canto, the poet—or, strictly speaking, the "I" of the poem—evokes that on such a day as the one described, February 28, 2024, his mother would have turned 107. And these two elements—the old baluerno of the clock and the birth of the mother—promote a serious and sustained reflection on the mystery of time and memory. We must add the constant, tutelary presence—which we already find in the wink of the title—of the Four quartets of T.S. Eliot, a work that also meditates deeply on our dying nature and the irredeemable condition of time.

It is structured, like a musical work, in four cantos: Slow, Adage, Andante moderato and Long graveIt is a self-referential work, also full of references to authors beloved by the poet (some of them outstanding representatives of German Romanticism). Of those I list, verses are quoted in the body of the poem that support his own: Riba, Hölderlin, the aforementioned Eliot, Beckett, and Dante. The most defining and fundamental of all are these three by Eliot, which, referring to the circularity of time, serve to substantiate one of the ideas of Antoni Marí's poem, that of the recurring end of the endless: "At the uncertain hour before morning / near the end of the interminable night / to the recurring fi."

Four sides It is a poem in which reflection is well accompanied by lyrical vision. The concepts ofEpiphany and of objective correlate, which have Joyce and Eliot himself as their coiners. The mother's birthday becomes an epiphany about the meaning of time (thanks to the epiphany, "you see things and the world as if for the first time"). The clock is a magnificent objective correlate. Some "restless, dancing" shadows have reminded me of the first pages of the investigation Proustian. But the poet still reflects on other matters: "the solitude of poetic discourse," for example, which he equates with that of "republican discourse"; the experience real, transcendental, of coexisting with the lyrical genre: "Reading poetry, one usually sees events / and poetic descriptions / from almost total immediacy"; the more open perspective of the self, born from the attentive, rigorous contemplation of nature; or the difference between perception and imagination.

In the description he gives us, in the third canto, of the deterioration of a family home on the Camino des Jondal, there is that emotion of putting into words what will never be again. There is desolation at the inevitable defeat (that of a house, that of life), but the poem ends with luminous verses, which express the desire for a "reconciliation of nature and spirit": "at any moment, it can become the spirit of hope." So be it, since the work has beautifully fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, its expressive and intellectual purpose.