Here it all ends (and begins)

Cap de Brot is the name of a new literary publishing house based in Girona, which publishes books in Catalan under a clear motto: "A publishing house that is not afraid." It will not be, because it is heading out to readers with three excellent but far from obvious books: the second book of poems by Laura G. Ortensi, an excellent young poet, entitled The mark of the hook, and two recoveries of classics, one deceased and one very much alive: Birds of clay, by Santiago Rusiñol, and This is where it all ends, by Josep Piera. Titles by Carme Guasch, Lluís Lucero Comas and Giordano Andriola, translated by Josep Domènech Ponsatí, will follow shortly. The books that come out of this Cape of Brot are beautiful, well designed, even neat, and make for good reading and good company.

This Saturday, the presentation of Piera's book took place at the Ona bookstore, which was also like a presentation of the publisher, as well as a surprise party dedicated to the author, with no other reason than to celebrate his literature and Josep Piera's love for life shared with friends. This is what Piera is about, the joy of living and the will to live that makes its way through the wounded skin of a sick body, until it prevails over death, the memory that saves and the present that is left behind to become the past. This is where it all ends, a diary of the author's stay in Naples and Sicily in the mid-eighties, during which he suffered a serious health problem that made him look death in the face for the first time, when he was not yet forty. Far from home, a foreigner in a hospital where the only joys were the voices of children playing outside and the reading of poetry.

Piera, who received the Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature a couple of years ago, has revised this new edition of the book and added an epilogue that is like a final chapter added to the text with the weight of the thirty-two years that have passed since the first edition. In addition to being one of our favorite poets, Piera stands out as a prose writer in travel books and memoirs, in titles such as The Green Cliff, Seductions of Marrakech or the memorialistic trilogy formed by Postwar whore, The fantastic seventies, 1969-1974 and A change of direction. The fantastic seventies, 1975-1979, without forgetting a unique and enjoyable book like The Golden Book: The Story of the Frying Pan as Never Told. In This is where it all ends It is an inquiry into one's own self that constitutes, as the poet Joan Deusa has said, "the human work of seeing the world as a miracle, and the miracle is dialogue."

Josep Piera is, in fact, a man of dialogue, both in literature and in life. He is also a firm supporter of pleasure, better known after experiencing pain. "The sick body tastes intensities of life," says a poem by Biel Mesquida. In the epilogue that he has added to this beautiful new edition ofThis is where it all endsJosep Piera closes the volume thus: "We live in pleasure and pain, in the real and the fantastic, in presence and absence, in what is close to us and in what we imagine. We live life and die death. And that is all."