When a poet pushes a work toward the market, everything slows to a crawl. Poetry can be seen as the mother of all arts, a craft that names objects by using abstraction. Some may argue that other art forms express this without words, yet one might ask: does painting not become poetry in image? These questions could spark a long debate, and since they cannot be decisively disproved here, this is a topic for another time.
Life goes on
Written by a contemporary poet, Retrato robot opens a reflective, lightly ironic collection of poems. The book begins with a photograph as a starting point, inviting a backward glance that carries no heavy nostalgia, but wears Cádiz’s signature humor as a quiet burden. The foreword, set in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the Rock of Gibraltar in June 2015, states: “Many years ago / from that photo / where I did not recognize myself. / Malnourished by dreams, / without poetry, / pretending to be someone else / and at the same time / being nobody. / At that time / I couldn’t fit my face / the perfect mask /-let’s say the officer’s costume, / for example / to disappear, / to be a shadow, / to run away from me, / to run away completely.” Memory helps illuminate the starting point. The title presents a robot portrait as a reconstruction of personality, a way to be identified through verse.
In every poetry volume, the poet seeks identity for both the self and the collective. The absence of a fixed identity becomes a through-line in this poetics. The journey moves through family memories and portraits from a distant past. In the poem Dressing Up as a Clown, the speaker recalls: “I remember disguised as a clown / disguised. / He would have been four or five years old, / surrounded by people / in the middle of the square, / it was carnival time. // Painted face. / Red suit, white shirt, / yellow wig, bow tie, / black hat, smiling. // Poet disguised as a clown. / The clown disguised as a poet.” Yet Cádiz’s joke sits alongside a bitter aftertaste, a trace of melancholy that never overpowers the voice but remains a quiet residue. Through Robot Portrait, the poet finds a steadier, more recognizable cadence. The collection earns a distinct stamp on its poetry.
The robot portrait unfolds in eight identifiable parts: prologue, memory, reflection, mysticism (upon request), metamorphosis, metamorphosis, pandemic diptych, and epilogue. Together they compose a substantial, cohesive book. The speaker is drawn toward the human spirit through verse, showing how concerns and insomnia are shared among readers. Reading echoes of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but inverted in tone and arc: from bug to human; from son to father; from coward to poet. From what the speaker never was to what he is, a strange blend of fear and hope lingers, a longing for a future that remains partly unseen, a man, a father, a poet—unbeaten and unmasked, a steady portrait of self.
The poet’s voice matures across the pages, examining surroundings through the lens of a child’s perception. The book signals a notable leap in the author’s craft, a move that feels earned through writing and persistence. Perhaps the impulse to publish this collection was a way to clear away the dust of memory and let new work emerge, since life’s tides shape the pieces that form a person over time. The final lines, presented as an epilogue in a poem titled Hopper’s Automaton, encapsulate this theme: “A failed attempt in a poem, / who draws / more than ever / reflection of the poet / who / as never before / this robot portrait.”