2023-11-23 15:35:11
Thursday, November 23, 2023, 12:57 | Updated 2:35 p.m.
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There will be few who have the creative ability of the writer and singer Xabier Montoia and that is why Jose Anjel Irigaray, a member of the Pamiela publishing house, emphasized this Thursday that the publication of the poetry book ‘Cities and Years’ is “very good news”. “It’s a happy book”, he begins his appointment.
In the last two years, Montoia has perfected his work and as he explained in the presentation, the two terms described in the title are the focus or main themes, “space, place and time”. About ten of those published are related to the concept of cities or concrete cities and the reader will notice them in all the reflections of time. Finally, he has also presented some in English, for Irigaray a sign of everything he knows about “other literatures”.
‘Cities and years’
Author: Xabier Montoia.
Publisher: Pamiela.
Style: Poetry.
Number of pages: 120.
Price: 15 euros.
As the author explains, ‘Cities and years’ is “my XXI. It is the poetry of the 20th century, my harvest” and he created it after a “tasty” streak of eighteen years. “Poetry comes to me when it wants and then it leaves”, he explained and illustrated with two clear examples: when he was walking in the autumn due to the rain and saw the pavement full of leaves, imprinted on the ground, he saw that he was reading a poem or a newspaper there when he saw a wild boar attack some tourists on a beach. “I had such a wave, I took a poetic look at myself as if I were a superhero”, he concluded.
As Irigaray has said, the poetics used by Montoia is “without artifice” and whether you like the end result more or less, he has defended that it is a “very interesting collection”, because it is “bitter, violent, critical and self-critical”, only the words necessary for it “going bare and to the essence”. used “The beat of poetics is evident”, he argued. On the other hand, in terms of imagery, the empty cities have a great importance, which is even stronger with the illustrations that come in the book.
Intermittent as long route
As Irigaray recalled in the presentation, Montoia published his first book of poetry, ‘Anfetamiña’ (Susa, 1983) 40 years ago, starting a prosperous but intermittent career. Recalling the words of the critics at the time, the Pamiela editor explained that it was “never a blow” and that the author used a “type, perspective, vocabulary and way of saying things” that had not existed in Basque poetry until then. Thus, he added that he was “conformist, dissident, against the aesthetic trend, provocative, with a very special style of speech, elliptical but precise and powerful, fresh and bitter”.
In the second work, ‘Lykanthropo’ (Susa, 1985), he moved away from the “effluxions” collected from the urban world in the previous work and came closer to nature, with the presence of more metaphors. Finally, in the third book of poetry of that decade, ‘Narraztien mintzoa’ (Susa, 1988), he published a work halfway between the previous two, a “synthesis, with a more refined language”.
The poetic silence of many years – during which he worked on a short story and a novel – was broken by a trip to Berlin, where his muse returned to him. Thus, in the poetry book ‘Bingo’ published in 2005, he examined the previous three with a “self-critical eye” and published what Irigaray described as an “anthology” with those created in Germany, lexically “more mature, written from the edge of disappointment, within that perfume coming from the sewer, and more developed, without artifice without”.
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