The concern for what can (still) be said is at the heart of this beautiful book, winner of the latest edition of the Carles Riba prize –the first held on a new date–. Let's look at the poem that opens the proceedings, Picking Cherries. The pretext, like most of the pretexts in the poetry of Jaume Coll Mariné (how welcome that is!), comes from country life, from a family coexistence with nature: in this case, a ladder propped against the trunk of a cherry tree, which has remained there after the harvest, done months before. That ladder, which at an inopportune time no longer serves any purpose, “I wish it would mean something.” Perhaps like poetry. Further on, we find a poem of a more ideological nature –which, in the final notes, the author acknowledges as “an attempt to read some of the ways of doing of [Pere] Gimferrer.” It repeats the verse five times: “We no longer know what to call it.” And it is done to insist on all that is falling apart for us: “Nothing is more rotten today / than walking with the name of Spain”; and, a few verses later: “All of Catalonia is a shell / a cracked husk / Nothing is more rotten today.”