Little by little, with a discretion that does not imply invisibility at all, the poetry collection of the University of Zaragoza, directed with such a good spirit by Fernando Sanmartín, is becoming a very special and increasingly prestigious space in the Spanish landscape, which means a prize for constant and well done work, to good literary criteria. And now that collection, The Grotto of Words , points a great deal by making his own the new poetic fragments of Lorenzo Oliván (Castro Urdiales, 1968), undoubtedly one of the strongest and most valuable poets of that same panorama.

These three movements , subtitled (Second vertices) , thus expand those Vertices that the Cultural Center of the Generation of 27 published in Malaga in 2006, and therefore have some plaquette , but by no means a minor project. Oliván has very well thought out and divided his work, and together with the books of aphorisms, on the one hand, and the full poems, on the other, he is offering a series of books in which he is becoming not only the main author of poetic fragments, but the most active theoretical about it . They are short poems, yes, but they are completely poems, without nuances, only that they respond explicitly to a different nature, less in terms of their extension but not (rather the opposite) in terms of their intensity or scope.

Oliván's readers already know well what they can find in this new installment: always self-demanding, always deep, always observant , our poet began to be something like a disciple of light, which is one of his understandable recurring obsessions, for, by force to insist, then become almost a teacher in that demanding discipline: "What if the light does not crack things? / What if it only gives a more secret map / to get to them?", he asks (what great texts in the form of a question Oliván has given us), and then give up again: «Learn from the rhythms of light / naturalness / with which you sometimes lose / and sometimes conquer».

With a juanramonian heart, Lorenzo Oliván can be a daily poet in the images of his aphorisms, which are sometimes very related to the greguerías (because, as his friend Manuel Vilas has just stated in Alegría , we often use objects to talk about ourselves), but in general it tends to the sublime, which does not mean that it renounces the low tone in its way of saying, or that it distances itself from that difficult simplicity that has always characterized it. Not only is he a great poet of landscapes (see his spectacular Ensenada de Ostende , in Unique North ), but over time he has also become more abstract in that sense, as happened with that of Moguer, and he looks at more immensities unbelievable : the sky, the sea, the time, the silence, the love, the death, the simply distant, definitively understanding that "Beyond / on the horizon / as alien / intimate". In that look towards the most remote there is a curious work of introspection, the eyes traveling alongside intelligence and bouncing in a fertile way through all known dimensions. It is an operation similar to the one that another excellent poet of his fifth, Enrique García-Máiquez, has expressed in an unappealable way in his also recent, and also magnificent, Bad than Good (Rialp): «On my skin / the sun / that It is one hundred fifty million kilometers away.

Among such significance there is also a place for metapoetic jokes, which nevertheless contain good clues about how to read what we are reading («He who does not know that in poetry / a single word changes everything // does not know a single word // of poetry »), But the fundamental thing is the wisdom provided by the experience itself, and above all the willingness to accept and take advantage of the things that have come, the conformity (not exactly resignation: if not, we would not write) to the inevitable, insatiable curiosity , the almost jubilant obedience to what happens in planes of reality that we cannot control : «Something good to touch bottom / is / the radical change of perspective».

At the beginning of 2020 the Pre-Textos publishing house will publish Las percepciones isla (1993-2018) , with a prologue by Juan Manuel Romero, an anthology that brings together 25 years of reflection and writing. It will be an optimal occasion to revisit the work of a poet who, however it is, must always be close, squeezing it in the same way that he squeezes what he looks at, taking advantage of an incomparable sensitivity.

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