If a universal thread runs through poetry, it is love. Yet love extends beyond human beings; the more places and peoples it touches, the richer it becomes. There is another enduring source of inspiration for poets across eras: nature. It holds everything a writer might need, a vast reservoir from which muses rise and hundreds of voices can tell their stories. Singing to nature remains an act of affection, whether it is a celebration or a lament for what has been lost.
An unpronounceable sea rises from the pages of José María Paz Gago, winner of the XIII Claudio Rodríguez International Poetry Prize, presented by Harm Hyperion. The book opens with an untitled poem that sets the tone: in the strange interplay of fate, the speaker writes before a Black Sea. Time dreams in the waters, ice blue light fractures the dawn of Arcadia, and a traveler traces the steps of a fugitive poet through long streets that memory has forgotten. The verse moves in short lines that carry a clear ecological message: human action and its destructive force on the planet. This is not a pessimistic book, though it sounds a warning. Paz Gago cautions about the small things we overlook as in his poem Planet in Shadow, where the planet shows its loss through vivid tonality, a daily carnage, pale stains on seas and spirits. The tides follow a black chronology, and the shell of the sea darkens as a drifting celestial shadow crosses the waters.
In the structure of the work, Paz Gago organizes the material into five chapters: Foreword, Naming the Tides, Apocalypse at the End of the World, Drifting War Machines, and Return to Origin. Each section treats the sea and its moods with a tone marked by restraint and elegance. The poet invites us to listen as the sea speaks in and out of itself, as in Mareas Negras, where ships drift and encircle the waters under a tense, calm surface. Obscene cargo and a grim procession of doom appear in the imagery: destroyers, freighters, oil tankers. From the bellies of those vessels emanates a poisonous brew, a black blood that stains the ocean with a color of omen. The verses cut with precision, exposing a plague that has seeped into daily life and conscience.
The Unpronounceable Sea becomes a lament for the Galician coastline and its people, a voice that remembers the catastrophe of the Prestige oil spill and the long shadow it cast. Living close to the sea makes its power inseparable from daily life, and Paz Gago crafts a rigorous meditation on how a community depends on what the sea provides and how fragile that dependence can be. Yet the book refuses to surrender to despair. The poet’s craft favors concise, piercing lines that can feel like a knife’s edge, but the final gesture offers a glimmer of restoration. In the closing poem, humanity is urged to begin again, to alter time, rhythm, and course as oceans breathe and slowly return to a starting point. The longing for a simpler, primordial state returns, even as war machines lie shattered and the sea writes its own letters in a bold narrative script. The ending leaves a sense that the sea is a mirror for society, a space where collective memory and moral responsibility are tested and clarified.