{"id":2255,"date":"2017-01-08T09:38:58","date_gmt":"2017-01-08T09:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joanmargarit.com\/es\/london-grip-poetry-review\/"},"modified":"2017-01-08T09:42:02","modified_gmt":"2017-01-08T09:42:02","slug":"london-grip-poetry-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joanmargarit.com\/es\/london-grip-poetry-review\/","title":{"rendered":"London Grip Poetry Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Cooke<\/strong> finds Joan Margarit<\/strong> to be a poet of authentic experience who does not rely on tricks or strain after effect.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Love is a Place<\/em> brings together Anna Crowe\u2019s versions of the three most recent collections of poetry by Joan Margarit, the greatest living Catalan poet and, many would claim, one of the most significant poets writing in Spain today. It follows two previous English-language volumes of his poetry: Tugs in Fog<\/em> (Boodaxe. 2006), a generous sampling from his first twenty years\u2019 work, and Strangely Happy<\/em> (Bloodaxe. 2011), which brought together two subsequent collections. Although Catalan is Margarit\u2019s mother tongue, he started out as a poet writing in Spanish and was educated in that language during the years of Franco\u2019s dictatorship, when the speech and culture of Catalonia were repressed. The poet\u2019s bilingualism and his family\u2019s experience of Spanish history are important aspects of his poetry, as expressed here in the opening lines of \u2018Pillage\u2019:<\/p>\n

When I was a child they wanted me to pluck out the tongue\r\nthat my grandmother spoke to me in\r\nas we came home from the fields at the end of the day.\r\nLike stones, flowers, loneliness\r\nall around, keeping us company, are words.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
In \u2018A History\u2019, he faces unflinchingly his country\u2019s past and his own family\u2019s involvement in it:<\/p>\n
A hundred years of war, my grandmother repeated:\r\nshe was a child living in a village where every night\r\nshe heard people fighting in the streets.\r\nAnd she would tell me, as though it were a story,\r\nabout the day the soldiers dragged\r\nher mother away to be shot at dawn\r\nagainst the cemetery wall.\r\nWhen I listened to her, I too was a child,\r\nand my father, a soldier in a detention centre.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Significant, also, is the fact that Margarit is not a \u2018career poet\u2019, but was active as an architect for all of his professional life, a fact that has informed poems such as \u2018Visits to Building Works\u2019 or \u2018Babel\u2019: \u2018I dreamed that I had to make the calculations \/ for a building of a thousand floors\u2019 It is, perhaps, the attention to detail and the scientific discipline that is required of an architect that has shaped Margarit\u2019s humane and unpretentious approach to the art and craft of poetry. In the eloquent prologue that he wrote for Tugs in Fog<\/em>, he speaks of what poetry means to him and what he has tried to achieve in writing it. They are words well worth the consideration of any aspiring poet. For Margarit, poetry is unashamedly subjective and should arise from deeply felt, authentic experience. It is not about tricks or straining after effect. Early on, he quotes from Diderot: \u2018Mediocrity is characterized by a taste for the extraordinary.\u2019 For Margarit, as for Wordsworth, \u2018poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.\u2019 In fact, he seems to feel that the poet is almost forced to memorialize his past experience, whether he wishes to or not, that \u2018forgetfulness\u2019 is \u2018a badly closed door\u2019.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
It is this truth to experience, conveyed in poetry that is uncluttered, articulate and devoid of pretension, that enables it to speak across a linguistic divide, although it should be said that Margarit has been fortunate in the close working relationship he has developed over the years with his English translator. Moreover, as Crowe suggests in her own introduction to Tugs in Fog<\/em>, Catalan is a more consonantal language than Spanish and has a more staccato feel to it, which tends to harmonize well with the rhythms of English. This is exemplified in the bruised stoicism of \u2018It Wasn\u2019t Far Away or Difficult\u2019, the title poem of the first collection included here:<\/p>\n
The time has come\r\nwhen life that is lost no longer hurts,\r\nwhen lust is a useless light\r\nand envy forgotten. It is a time\r\nof wise and necessary losses,\r\nit is not a time for arriving, but for going away.\r\nIt is now that love\r\nfinally coincides with intelligence.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Here the poetry is a question of grandiloquence and measured cadences, its musicality enhanced by alliteration and vocalic harmony. It\u2019s a poetry based on the truth and simplicity that we often seem to have abandoned in our quest for novelty and far-fetched imagery. Referring again to Margarit\u2019s prologue in Tugs in Fog<\/em>, the reader will note his insistence that \u2018poetry is not a question of content but of intensity.\u2019 While one may accept that there is some truth in this statement, the content is nonetheless important in Margarit\u2019s poetry and focuses on what is most important to us all: mortality, suffering, isolation, and the hard-won moments of love and peace that are achieved against that backdrop. It should be noted also that if Margarit\u2019s poetry works so well in English, that may also owe much to his affinity with certain English poets, most notably, Hardy and Larkin.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
At times he reminds one also of Cavafy in his evocations of old age. In \u2018Strolling\u2019 an old man remembers himself as \u2018a serious child\u2019 who \u2018has been obedient all his life\u2019 but concludes with a beautiful evocation of human transience:<\/p>\n
The child returns and takes him by the hand. \r\nBoth of them move away \r\nuntil they are a dot in the sky. Birds of passage.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
As with Cavafy, old age brings wisdom and a sense of resignation that is nonetheless tinged with regret. In \u2018I\u2019ll Wait for You Here\u2019 he laments that \u2018 now \/ no women would want to dance with him. And he resigns himself to it, but he doesn\u2019t smile\u2019. As in the work of the great Alexandrian, there is also candour in acknowledging one\u2019s sexuality. Here he is in \u2018Old Man on the Beach\u2019:<\/p>\n
Ferocious summer floods the whole space.\r\nWith my gaze sliding over breasts and belly,\r\ntowards the pubis of this young woman,\r\na brutal longing is dazzling me. \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
However, love in all its forms is central to this poet\u2019s work: the love between a man and a woman and that between family members and, in particular, the poet\u2019s love for his handicapped daughter, Joanna, who died prematurely. Its importance is made clear in the final lines of \u2018Love is a Place\u2019, the title poem of his most recent collection:<\/p>\n
Love is a place.\r\nIt endures beyond everything: from there we come.\r\nAnd it\u2019s the place where life remains.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Sometimes the poet evokes the seeming impossibility of maintaining love, as in \u2018The Sun on a Portrait\u2019: \u2018So much talking and so much arguing \/ while our love was slipping away from us\u2019. In \u2018Infidelity\u2019 loss is clouded by guilt. In \u2018Suffering\u2019 he describes the anguish of parents at the inevitable loss of a child: \u2018In the Accident & Emergency corridor I saw \/ our helplessness in your eyes.\u2019<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
In Margarit\u2019s poetry the reader will find no easy answers. In \u2018The Origins of Tragedy\u2019, God is dismissed as \u2018the most brutal of myths\u2019. Philosophy, likewise, provides no satisfactory explanations in \u2018Lyric at 70\u2019:<\/p>\n
Let no one search in this lyric\r\nfor the big bonfires of the solstices.\r\nIt is philosophers who kindle them,\r\nand religions, but they provide no warmth\r\nfor the cold there is in metaphysics,\r\nwhich is the same as in superstition.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
Ultimately, all the poet has is his poetry, a difficult and challenging art which is sometimes analogous to the rock of Sisyphus, but which nonetheless gives him solace and moments of illumination:<\/p>\n
Poetry is the first logic.\r\nIt has always spoken of the same thing, and yet,\r\nwhat it says is always new, just as the rising\r\nof the sun or sky at night is new.<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
Website:\u00a0http:\/\/londongrip.co.uk<\/a>
\nUrl:\u00a0http:\/\/londongrip.co.uk\/2017\/01\/london-grip-poetry-review-margarit\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Cooke finds Joan Margarit to be a poet of…
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