“When they are not overloaded with erudition and galore notes, they are complete works or an accumulation of poems confused to stun and disorientation of neophyte readers”, explains editor Carlos González Espina. This bet, together with the illustrator and editor Marina Lobo, for a collection with “possibilities of staying in bookstores longer”. They are anthologies that they want to avoid the bite of the “novelty syndrome”In other words, they are designed to be part of well-chosen booksellers.
The publishing house from Gijón has published throughout this month the first two installments of “Poetas con impronta”, the name of the collection. The first volume is an anthology of Antonio Machado. Under the title “Today is always still”, the teacher, critic and also poet José Luis García Martín gleaned some of the poems that best define the author of “Campos de Castilla”. The second installment is dedicated to Li Bai (Li Po), the great Chinese lyric of the Tang dynasty, in an edition signed by the former director general of Culture of the Principality, Martín López-Vega, and entitled “Leaning on the clouds.”
González Espina, who coordinates this collection together with García Martín, announced yesterday that four other anthologies are already in preparation: Hilario Barrero is the editor of “Camaradas”, the selection of poems by Walt Whitman; the young poet from Gijón and philologist Dalia Alonso prepares a selection of Greek lyric (“Pieria’s roses”). And José Ángel Cilleruelo and Lorenzo Roal work in two editions of Fernando Pessoa (“Be everything in all ways”) and Emily Dickinson (“When the roses no longer bloom”).
“Not all poets or all poems feel the same as the pace and weight of the years and centuries. There are great poets whose work is weighed down by poems that are indigestible to today’s sensibilities, ”González Espina emphasizes. And it says even more: “It’s about freeing them from that rust and selecting the most timeless texts.”
In these anthologies, the typographic care of the book also stands out. There is an obvious intention to highlight the poem as a “self-sufficient piece”. “There will always be a single poem per page, with typography, margins and line spacing that focus the reading on each text, without any distraction,” says the editor. It also states that “Poetas con impronta” responds to a line of publications that serves as “refuge value in a time in which almost everything has been returns”, in reference to the months that bookstores had to close due to sanitary restrictions due to the covid-19 pandemic.
And there are some more arguments, in the opinion of González Espina, to defend this collection of “essentials” of universal poetry: “The disorientation that we detect among new poetry readers, the youngest and those who are just starting out; a disorientation that is not accidental: social networks have spread all kinds of gender by-products as poetry, yes, very successful ”.
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