Man faces his lights and shadows. We all hide a demon inside us, but it’s a child who laughs and is afraid at the same time. The history of literature is full of this, children growing up with burning pain and not healing the wound. Because that’s what poetry is, an unhealing wound that reminds us of what we are every time it bleeds. There are hundreds and hundreds of examples. This is why the poet questions life. Metaphysics and its conditions are the driving force that pushes him to write. The writer is the historian of the physical and subtle, the one who shows us what lies beyond the sensory world. Since the writer is the explorer of worlds, he is the one who opens the curtain and shows us what’s beyond. There are other worlds in this world.
We can say that In Times of Suicide, published by Luis Miguel Sanmartín from the Valencian publishing house Olé Libros, with a foreword by Jorge Pérez Cebrián, is a chronicle of disintegration. Faced with his shadows, the man thinks about what happened to him. He opens his collection of poems with a poem that serves as a porch for what we are about to read: «I live closed and alone // I confess my atavism / in images that do not belong to me and that I maintain // I fall asleep in despair (my father sweats) / and sometimes I am fortunately ignorant / when I wake up I smile // my days It consists of castor oil / and horse holes (I grow spider webs)». There is a despair, the vision of the existentialists who see the glass half empty, what surrounds society does not breathe. It is a reflection of how one’s own life and circumstances are diluted by what is happening.
But the poet does not lower his arms, he just acts as a notary of what happens to him and filters them into the poem. The book oscillates between grays and ruins, as seen in his poem titled In the Ruin of Ruins: “The world is a cage. // To continue. // Living is a settlement / (one breathes) / the part of oneself that is not ours. // The world is a spider, hairy meridians / that make my skin tingle. But not because of your kisses, / that grayish scent chooses the weakest; /The one who is a chain to me, /The one who condemns me…” Because the poet feels condemned to live, because life does not satisfy him very much, but he continues with its existence and conditions. Existentialism is born from poetry because it is vate that raises the first doubts when using language. Everything you name exists and remains , what you keep silent is what is forgotten and hidden.
Luis Miguel Sanmartín is not the poet of failure because he did not fail. There were circumstances that plagued his life and gave his poetry a gray patina. But it’s not all darkness, like any good writer, it’s not all autobiography, it’s just a filter of lives, other beings pass through it and tell what happened to them, what burned them. Like a medium, Sanmartín only writes down what he hears, sees, or occasionally feels. This is the testimony in poems in times of suicide. Because from poetry, from beauty, tragedy takes on the tone of a disguise. Poetry is the perfect tool for unraveling, and that’s what Luis Miguel does: He opens the channel and lets the blood flow. As in the final lines at the book’s conclusion: “The world will be the scent of hours / it will be an empty footprint / /and I will have lived // and I will have died.”