“What the bee is looking for”: a few bread crumbs on the windowsill

Víctor Herrero won the last poetry prize of the city of Salamanca with “What the bee seeks” and from its title, later corroborated by reading the poem with the same title, I remembered this somewhat enigmatic statement by Rainer Maria Rilke, the antonomasian poet, born , full-time: “Poets are the bees of the invisible. » In fact the poem ends like this: “always prefer the invisible – the back/of the stone soaked in dew,/the minimum, what the bee seeks,/the grain that love transforms into bread”. balance’, also a book of poetry, his first, with which he unfortunately closed the Jerez publishing house last year, with a name of Machadon origin, Canto y Cuento, responsible and under the care of the great poet José Mateos, We knew that Herrero is from Salamanca from 1980 and nothing else. We were briefly informed of his status as a Capuchin friar and professor of biblical literature. He had already published two essays: “Sadness” and “The House Without Walls of Life”. In an even more succinct manner if possible, he summarized in this first collection of poetry, in “What suits the poem”, the crucial part of his biography, his faith in life: “At twenty years old, I made a vow to poverty,/I cut my hair.” hair/and I approached the birds […] I’ve done nothing better than sleep/naked and trust. In this last verse the exceptional, affirmative and anthemic poetry of his compatriot Juan Antonio González Iglesias seems to resonate. Today, in the pages of “What the Bee Seeks”, he has brought together around fifty poems of shocking nudity, very difficult to achieve, more than poetry, it seems that he made this choice vital directly in verse. We even have the impression that the poet emerges unscathed from any vanity inherent in the poetic exercise itself, perhaps because, in an unprecedented way, he does not in any way sully what he names. What is collected from his harvest on the flap of the recent collection of poems, excellent as Herrero himself says, by Lola Mascarell, “Lend me your voice”, that the Valencian author “transforms his own voice into a music stand where she can whisper the passage of time, the meaning of gestures, the small places where epiphany chooses to show itself. “There is a scent of goodness in his poetry” applies entirely to his. Like all true poetry, that of this author is quite resistant to hermeneutics. What is more, any attempt at exegesis of his words, of his verb as a transposition of the entire universe, one could more accurately say, seems to me, apart from the fact that it is vain and useless, as always is literary criticism, being at any time a big blow that it is not deserved. But, noblesse oblige, I intend to finish the review of the book of this scholar, linguist and etymologist, who masters, according to his poems, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, who also refers to the medieval mystic Richard in his towards. of San Victor (“ubi amor, ibi oculus”) or to “The Divine Comedy” as to Marguerite de Yourcenar or Simone Weil We are confronted with a poetry with Bobinian roots, so rare in these regions, vitalist (“life, in”. each atom it is given”), celebration of the here and now, of the openness, of the constant dawn, which fully responds, in its entirety, to Horacio’s initial quote: “I m “I strive to seek what is true and practical and I throw myself entirely into it.” To achieve this, the will is incardinated in faith already in the first poem, in which a stone becomes a piece of bread, it manifests itself again and again, through love (if you one day manage to live with love …), which moves and transcends everything, always carried by “a surge of clarity”, to the point of approaching the prodigality of reality, its wonder: “I believe that happiness is in reality”. But it is not a question of embellishing, idealizing, or even sanctifying what has been experienced, but of making it sacred, from attention to nuances, from the care taken in the choice of non-poisoned words, from the demand for extreme slowness, for purification even in pain, for the journey. which in itself transforms and illuminates if we let ourselves go and, as we have said, above all, love as the center, axis of light, in the face of power and politics Kingdom of Cordelia What the bee seeks Victor Herrero 112 pages. 12.95 euros Above the fundamental sediment, the humus of the biblical, the Franciscan combines, in large part, as “brother of the clouds and the dry land” (according to a proverbial verse of Borges, Whitman and Francis of Assisi “they have already written their poem”) with the mystical, small, intertextual: “they crossed forts and borders”. The expressive transparency, of a moving naturalness, is not fixed rhetorically because it is supported by a rhythmic classicism, with appoggiatura both in the cultivated verse par excellence, the hendecasyllable, and in the popular and traditional verse, the octosyllable, not even when the author dares with the tenth spinel or the white. Related news STANDARD INTERVIEW Si Amancio Prada: “When I sing, I stop being who I am to be what I am most” C. MONJE The performer celebrates the fifty years of his first album, ‘Vida e Morte ‘, “the seed of all that followed” In the wake of the Platonic triad (truth, beauty, goodness), certain that “the basis of life is good” and that “imagining the good is almost feasible”, his pure and welcoming gaze towards all things, brings together, “in the midst of so much confusion” reigning, in a harmonious way, silence, innocence resulting from extreme simplicity, calm as an “offering” and joy, prescribed by Kafka, “like a bird that alights”, through epiphanies, rather hierophanies, minimal, of walking barefoot through the world, seeking and obtaining, in the process, a consolation, whether in the music of Bach the divine, balm for the sores and sorrows of existence, in the ancient glories of Castilian houses, in the “angels of Giotto” or in “the stamens of flowers”. Or, in the final poem, in the bread that the poet breaks into pieces and leaves on the windowsill for “a sleepwalking blackbird to find/and feed on the crumb/its morning flight.” Just as the reader is nourished and comforted by Herrero’s crystalline and luminous verse.

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