If we had to choose a universal theme in poetry, it would be love. But love is not limited to the human realm, the more places or people there are, the more we love, and there is a theme that has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for poets of different eras, a beautiful piece of an ordinary Word. Nature, with everything it contains, is the source from which muses emerge and from which hundreds of writers can capture their accounts. Singing to nature is still an act of love, as an act of celebration or a lament for what we have allowed to lose.
An unpronounceable sea, a song to the seas that have suffered so much from human hands, by José María Paz Gago, winner of the XIII Claudio Rodríguez International Poetry Prize published by Hiperión. The untitled poem that opens the book is a preview of what we will encounter: «By strange twists of fate/I write these verses/In front of a Black Sea./The waters dream of time,/ice blue shines/reflects an atmosphere/unique brilliance in the dawn of Arcadia .//I follow in the footsteps of the fugitive poet/his luck and verses/infiltrate the long streets/what they no longer remember/impossible deeds, valiant parties,/war dramas and hallucinatory visions/reconstructing his passage/still a calm sea». The reader will be able to find a clear poem in short lines and a clear ecological message: human action and its destructive power on the planet. It would be a mistake if they could have thought this a pessimistic book, perhaps because Paz Gago warns of the dangers we face in the way we mistreat the little things we have, as in his poem Planet in Shadow: “The planet has lost. /vivid tonality./Daily carnage/pale watercolor stain/seas and spirits.//With chronological precision/black tides follow each other/like shadows hardened in battle/darkens its liquid shell/the/shadow of this drifting celestial».
Paz Gago divides the book into five separate chapters: Foreword, Naming the Tides, Apocalypse at the End of the World, Drifting War Machines, and Return to Origin. These five sections address the sea and its conditions with a tone of elegance. Sing, slipping into or out of the sea, as he tells us in the poem Mareas negras: «Ships drifting,/ships that encircle/sea/sea in tense calm/with obscene doomsday cargo,/destroyers, freighters/oil tankers. //From their plagued bellies/a deadly poison comes out,/black blood, black gold/–black omens–/tides of unpronounceable color./Since the dawn of this plague/suicidal shipwrecks,/monsters shed shamelessly/poisonous excrement, acid residues,/ breath of the deepest of hell».
The Unpronounceable Sea is a lamentable book about the ecological struggle of the Galician people. We will all remember the Prestige disaster and its consequences. When you are surrounded by the sea and your people live with it and for it, it is difficult not to use the sea as the source of everything. We are here with an in-depth and in-depth work by a masterful and masterful writer. The absence of grandiose speech becomes powerful. Short lines cut like a knife. But not everything is negativity; In his last poem, Paz Gago places hope: «Humanity begins again,/ changes time, rhythm and course,/ oceans breathe/ and slowly returns to the starting point,/ to the starting point. Longing for the primitive state.//War machines shattered,/SEA’s letters with power/with short storybook calligraphy/and loving double-lipped voices// her name will no longer be unpronounceable». Because the sea is a metaphor for us or for society, it is the place where consciences are cleared or misery poured out.