Between two dark waves, everything is waves

Now that the year-end book lists seem to be over (summary: we're against lists, but if we're included, we like them more), I'd like to draw attention to two books that I think are important: Between two dark, by Antoni Vidal Ferrando (Ediciones Proa) and Everything is waves, by Josep Piera (Editorial Asuntos). One in verse and the other in prose, one author from Mallorca and the other from Valencia, one born in 1945 and the other in 1947, two essential authors of contemporary Catalan literature.

Between two dark It is a book of poems written with a demanding, at times imposing, mastery, in which an idea of human life unfolds, and therefore a moral discourse that admits no evasions or bargaining. A handbook for facing the end of days: our own, and also those of the world we thought we had come to build, defeated and scorned by the world that imposes itself, brutal reality versus volatile desire. Vidal Ferrando invokes the memory of a vanished time ("Of the street where I was born only remnants remain, / intertwined, crucified dreams," he writes in the poem Nettles), but it also looks squarely at current events, the relentless weather that shakes us ("It rains bewilderment, countless infectious agents," we read in Bad weather). The book follows the line of excellence of Vidal Ferrando's previous poetry books (If fog rolls in, I'll have nowhere to go. and Unprotected waters(to cite only the two above) and takes charge not only of the two dark periods in which human existence takes place—that before birth and that after death—but also of the recurring darknesses in which societies, nations, cultures are built, everything that is dying because it is made by us, humans.

Josep Piera, winner of the Catalan Letters Honorary Prize, has frequently written articles for various newspapers and magazines throughout his career. Everything is waves It brings together a selection of his articles, a selection that is anything but random: the selection of the texts has been made by the poet Ramon Ramon (who has also published an excellent book this year: the diary The Year of the Fifties(published by Lleonard Muntaner Editor) and has as its common thread the Mediterranean, which is the passion that runs through Piera's work from one end to the other: both his poetry, as well as his travel books, as well as his memoirs (The post-war damnation, The fantastic seventies 1969 - 1974 and its continuation, The Fantastic Seventies 1975 - 1979(indispensable) are permeated by the awareness of Mediterranean identity, of a deep belonging to this community that oscillates between ancient knowledge and the current anxieties of a Europe in crisis. Everything is waves It is—as the poet Maria Josep Escrivá illustrates in the prologue—a series of windows to the sea, a conscious effort to overcome ugliness, and to value and preserve all that is precious in inhabiting what Damià Huguet, another poet of this generation, called the Mediterranean corral. We read Piera and Vidal Ferrando (and Ramon Ramon, and Maria Josep Escrivá, and Damià Huguet) in 2026 as well.