The year 2021 left us little poetry in Asturian. Sicasí, the two anthologies by Xosé Bolado that were published -“A bird so light” and “N’harmonía”- and this one by Pablo Antón Marín Estrada of which I will speak darréu, “Pozu sin fondu”, were well worth covering the missing, supplying the novelty with quality. Pablo Antón Marín Estrada is an enormous poet, on a par with others and others who, by writing in languages that are more appreciated than Asturian, have the possibility of receiving recognition and awards that writers in this language are forbidden to do. This circumstance and the lack of attention that the Asturian public dedicates to Asturian writers is something that Marín Estrada does not ignore and that stains the closest verses in time with sadness, which, with everything, vindicates the feeling of ‘a trip “noble and necessary… […] it still ends in failure. ”
Marín Estrada’s journey begins with “El blues del llaberintu” (1989), a book excluded, by decision of the author, from this anthology. It is in the poems “Les hores” (1990) where the poet expresses for the first time the voice that we know, clear and reflective, and addresses the theme that characterizes, with different nuances, his poetry: the pace of time The scenarios of childhood, a symbol of lost time, are taking shape, along with evocations that announce a certain concern for historical memory and meditations where the elegy of Greco-Latin roots takes root in the contemporary terrain of the feeling of strangeness. This voice, which links with other traveling companions such as Xuan Bello, ends up modulating in the third poem book, “Díes d’inocencia” (1992), where the author uses poetic prose to finish building his universe. literary.
With “Un tiempo meyor” (1996), Marín Estrada delves into the practice of the poetry of experience and literary recreation. The señardá dyes some verses where the resistance of the young poet to leave behind the unblemished time of childhood is alluded to. Four years later, “Otra edá” (2000) represents the definitive leap towards maturity. The evocation of Mayáu Solís reflects the attitude of someone who resigns himself to being in time and losing his personal and collective identity: “…It doesn’t matter./You don’t have a place to return to either”.
After an interval introduced by “Los Baños del Tevere” (2003), where each poem recreates a famous painting, in “Estrañu Animal” (2010) we find again the poet of the free time, more than ever to philosophical reflection. The different voices that he adopts every time and some variation in his motifs, which integrate, with increasing frequency, the theme of death, do not take away so that in all the poems the precise and singular tone of an author can be recognized so that each This event lived or remembered is an occasion to meditate on the existence and the temporal river that leads to it, which includes the project, always threatened by failure, to write in Asturian: “We write in the language of the year…”. The motif that gives the title to the shinbone also belongs to this work, that “bottomless well” that refers, at the same time, to death -the bottomless in childhood- and to dissatisfaction.
In the poems of “Farewell” (2011), Marín Estrada evolves towards an increasingly intense emotion and a reflection that wants to be stoic but when it reveals more despair than resignation. The process is completed in the last collection of poems, “La Tierra y el cielu” (2018), which inserts, integrating them with mountain accords, very interesting evocations of the industrial past of Asturias. It is as if what was given to us in the early years in an outline, over time was taking shape and filling itself with content. The youthful meditations on the passage of time, still abstract and anchored in readings, are giving way to a word pregnant with pain, hit by the blows of life. A word that is, as the years go by, more and more formosa.
Pozu without fondu. Poetry (1989-2019)
Pablo Anton Marin Estrada
Imprint, 300 pages 17 euros
With the help of the Ministry of Culture, Language Policy and Tourism of the Principáu d’Asturies
Marta Mori