Death often arrives with a teasing, uneven rhythm, leaving a wake of ache that’s hard to name. Even when the reality is known, the ache of a loved one’s departure feels beyond words. People sometimes try to leave something behind, a quiet mark against the void, because losing someone to silence feels like a failure to be remembered. The poet Jaime Gil de Biedma spoke of leaving a mark and hoping for applause, a sentiment that echoes through the pages of this collection.
Published by Páramo, David González’s Firefly Song gathers posthumous poems that many readers feel as a personal farewell from a friend. This compact volume functions as both testament and eulogy, a life distilled into verses that carry the vigor of a life fully lived. It can be read as a closing chapter from a writer who helped shape a movement, and as a beacon for those who follow. The opening poem, Lost Cause, lays out a clear purpose: a declared stand against the cynicism of modern myths, and a call to fight for meaningful values when they seem endangered.
These works appear as the product of a writer who, perhaps sensing the end, exposes his fullest poetic and artistic potential. González, long associated with a stark, unflinching realism, is celebrated for carrying truth as a banner and portraying the human spirit without remorse. The collection, though brief at only thirty poems, presents the core of González’s world. In its pages he opens up, using poetry as penitence and life as material. In The Glacial Right Whales, he writes a stark and intimate farewell that lingers in the reader’s memory: forty years later, the speaker is stranded, waiting for someone to restore an ocean of shared love without breath or exhaustion in the heart.
As a writer, David—friend and artist—leaves a space the size of a shell, a living testament formed in his final weeks as he reviewed life and craft on film. The Firefly Song offers a last lesson on resilience, a daily practice of showing up even when the odds feel heavy. The closing lines of the final poem frame the confrontation with fate: when life turns against us and the urge to fight seems pointless, the world may appear to own the last word. And yet the poem insists that death may hold the final word, a stark reminder of mortality and the sense that some conversations go on beyond the end of speech.
Readers will feel a personal sting, even as they acknowledge the author’s lasting strength. This collection is like a family album that deserves to be revisited, offering a glimpse of the past that helps shape how the present is faced. González’s absence is felt, but the work endures—an enduring spark that continues to illuminate anyone who encounters it. The Firefly Song invites readers to follow a voice that burned bright, even as the author moved beyond reach, and to consider how art can carry a life forward when words begin to fade.