One believes in the symbolic nature of time cycles: Seven years ago I wrote in these pages about Camp de Mar, Andreu Jaume’s first collection of poetry to be published as a literary critic, and seven of them are a biblical cycle. Concerning these editions, which range from Connolly to Iris Murdoch in a long list of translations, many of which are poetic, Andreu Jaume is essentially an editor in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term and of that world, Anglo-Saxon, which in addition to his selection, fills his imagination each year. is a person. So when I read Camp de Mar—the first thing we read in a book—I didn’t think of its title, of Camp de Mar, of Majorca place names, and of Andreu Jaume’s sentimental or scenic spot. , no . I thought of Eliot’s Four Quartets—one of his most recent translations for Lumen—and East Coker, just like in the Camp de Mar book, Camp de Mar place and vice versa. I’m talking about metaphysics, not connotation. There was also a position where the poet took refuge, the leafy tree of tradition. Not the Costa i Llobera branch, not the Gil de Biedma branch, not the Valente branch – and if I’m talking here it’s because I’m talking about the word metaphysics – not the Ferrater branch, be careful: both still in Camp de Mar and in Tormenta – Jaume’s new In his book—there is a Ferraterian wink as well as an Audenian wink, which is the source for the length of the poem. Now I think of ‘Memoriam’ but first of all I think of ‘Poema inacabat’. back then?
We must go back to Eliot and Pound in Tormenta, still in its first pages, and honor them – as Jaume does in his verses here and there – as an explanation for England’s great bard. one’s own poetics and understanding of life’s riddles Leaves of the tree, I repeat. And in it, the oscillation between the two paths of modernity in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Beginning with the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, descended from Romanticism and whose main heir is Thomas Hardy (Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen or Philip Larkin are minor branches of this school) and World War II. The avant-garde whose prophet was Pound, Eliot’s most eminent representative in Europe—there were more in the United States, but I’ll just mention Wallace Stevens, who was also much loved by Jaume—and his most human distillation and fruition, WH Auden. both currents. Complexities that unite us over time (Jaume was the editor of two of my poetry collections). But as I speak of humanity in a traditional and friendly sense, I have not forgotten that Basil Bunting, through Pound, loved it, without forgetting the basic parameters that allowed Andreu Jaume’s poetry to slip in its first approach. There are others—as there are other drifts—and there is the German charm behind it—so typical for a disciple of Jordi Llovet—with the shadow of a Rilkean Barral behind it, but I’ll stop here because it’s not the time yet. It will come if needed.
These two books, Camp de Mar and Tormenta and Andreu Jaume, form part of a family of Majorcan poets whose works are in Spanish, and they are not voluntarily sought after, but they are. There is no leafy tree, as in Anglo-Saxon or Catalan poetry, but there is an open flow to all others, enriched by European and American poetry of the 20th century. From Jacobo Sureda’s Sorcerer of the Five Senses to Tormenta, whose prose is powerfully poetic, and named after names like Cristóbal Serra, Eduardo Jordá, Enrique Juncosa, Juan Planas Bennásar, Antonio Rigo, Vidal Valicourt… -and I’m indulging because there’s more -, Majorcan poetry in Spanish, from the remoteness of Eliot to the proximity of Graves, from the avant-garde to the tradition, managed to find the humus necessary to be outside of anything and enrich oneself. critique of formality or militancy. In fact, these are things that do not need to be written. Andreu Jaume’s ingenious place – as with others cited or not mentioned – is at Camp de Mar and still is in Tormenta, and that’s what counts. It happens similarly with Eivissa and Vicente Valero or Ben Clark. Only in Jaume the landscape is also mental.
A poetry book should not be separated from each unique reader and should not be destroyed. Let’s leave that to the teachers, but of all the poetic planes Tormenta still moves on, the most narrative, in my opinion, is where she does it more easily, with emotion and with a critical distance. Others will prefer different directions. Here for me is the story of love and misunderstanding, of Florence, of abandonment, of loneliness, of the jump between the shores of Majorca and the Italian city, and of the rhythm marked by the things connected in lines, thoughts and vital spirit. reader, I realized the spirit that sustains the book, and that that spirit resides in the leafy tree, which I describe here as an invitation. Just a side note: ‘When Gil de Biedma killed his character/finally got rid of the biographical’ (sic) the point was, I think, that he had written his best ‘final poems’; Freed from himself, he stopped writing, and death was already there. And Tormenta still, deep down—poetry as a being—knows it.