The ambitious project of assembling Luis Antonio de Villena’s poetry—vast, rich, and deeply felt—has already reached completion. The two volumes labeled La Belleza impura present a poet who sits at the crossroads of classical and avant-garde, where innovation brushes against tradition. This luminous aura of sometimes awakened beauty is found in others who are always ready to sense poetry’s fullness and splendor. Impure Beauty gathers poems that were dropped or left unpublished from his books and even includes pieces from the latest manuscript he was developing. Time, unconquered and resplendent, sometimes extinguishes pleasure, while the spell-work on the page shifts when the glass is broken. Villena’s characters surge with inner decay, an exuberant love that expands across his verses with a pompous reach. Untouchable beauty lingers for a moment, as in the poem dedicated to Marilyn Monroe. Lives of fame or anonymity drift toward passion and meet the wreckage of human folly, already aware of the yellowed glare that once captured a photograph. The moment’s taste is savored with a strange hedonism, a sense of belonging and loss that lingers: the death wish whispers in the voice of roses.
Luis Antonio de Villena offers a portrait of a poet who, in abundance, speaks to readers through a refined cultural sensibility. The works reveal a blend of high culture and accessible clarity, inviting the reader to explore poetry through familiar sights and scents—a painting’s texture, a journey, or a memory. The ecstatic life of youth resurfaces in the verses, reminding and summarizing that vitality. Even with a utopian impulse, the most fitting stage for beauty to become reality is the night when jasmine fills the air and wine is shared on a terrace. The craft of poetry is treated as a form of artistic exchange that stretches beyond accepted boundaries, where reality is gently insinuated and sometimes challenged. The poet proclaims a bold stance: art is, at times, a bold theft and a force that invites living fully. The idea of adventure serves as both guide and corrective to life as it is.
The flow of pleasure disrupts routines and invites a savior scent of beauty to be applied with care. Against vulgar mediocrity, writing rises with elegance and insistence, inviting the reader to feel the divine intensity that Madrid’s poet brings to every line. A certain nostalgia—present in the later stages of the compilation and observed in prose poetry—intensifies as the collection nears completion. The roar of the imagination becomes a quiet contemplation, as if watching a tapestry in an old house come alive. Fifty-one years of poetic work have been gathered in La Belleza impura, showing that there are poets whose distinctive, personal voices deserve elevation to the status of artist. The poetry of Luis Antonio de Villena invites readers to rise with it, to take part in a celebration of lofty aspiration and human feeling.