Childhood leaves its mark on everyone’s life. It’s the early years that guide the rest. Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück summarized this very well in her poem Homecoming: “We look at the world only once, in childhood. / The rest is memory. We look at childhood as an abyss or like a father observing his child in the newborn waiting room. This is life. It usually happens to me. When I try to remember something, memories intersect and blend together on the same timeline, as if everything were the same experience shared in the same year. We are children of our past, and it is this past that returns and builds what we will eventually become.
Children of Halley’s Comet by Manuel Valero Gómez, winner of the XV Martín García Ramos International Poetry Prize, opens with a certain air of nostalgia for poetry, with a foreword by José Escánez Carrillo published by the Difácil publishing house. We don’t know if there was a better time in the past, but it was different. What we capture is our memory or vision of history. Valero opens his collection of poems with a poem titled Patio de Armas, a statement of intent: “The last soldier’s women / with the red shop window perfume / with the earthy aroma of fruit. / And the wind / stone or threat / beats against the walls of time / like someone / hope sheds its leaves / sweetly in your hands.
As with all poetry, memory is the backbone of Manuel Valero’s work. It is these experiences that build a solid poetics full of nuances. But this is not just your own experience, there is also reading and observation: «You have the habit of clearing the table at midnight: / glasses first / cutlery and crockery. / You don’t hear how the wolves howl in the forest. / However, / you seek compromise in your duty / and soon you leave yourself / to reading alone. Observation of everyday life makes the local universal, which is the nuance that really matters in a work. The solidity of any body of poetry is measured not by what happens, but by how the author captures life. The how is more important than the what. It is form rather than substance. Language as a tool and weapon.
It is not just nostalgia or memory that builds Valero’s poetry, but there is also a protest and social aspect to his voice. The poems are screams against an unsupported society based on the most violent capitalism. Oh, capital! The poem titled My Capital! (Psalm Against Walt Whitman): «Financial markets / know / Sunday afternoons / countless deserts / subaltern classes // All life is somehow summed up // People come and go, / their glasses slip / partitions between parquet floors and usury // The day / begins / among the dawn of nickel and gold / moth-eaten curtains, coats / garbage trucks and blood ointments.
Words are very important in Manuel Valero’s poetry. In Children of Halley’s Comet, the author of Alicante bases his poems on it. Language is his way of creating a solid collection of poems with his orientation towards memory and justification. There are many works in this work written by a son of his time, and the title itself indicates this. Valero, like many others, is the son of Halley’s comet; They follow the celestial body almost without remembering it, as if it were their totem, as if its passage had blessed them. He closes his collection of poems with a poem that is a declaration of intent in which he reaffirms that the word is his home, his home, his refuge: «The word is purple/ and the silent mirror/ is the truth/ is the gloom/ and the hand / where is yesterday still tomorrow/ where are the pages three hundred/ of a tired book / reminds us:/And you ask me, what is materialism?/Materialism is you.