Juan Ramon Barat is an author committed to the word, which means a frank dialogue between dialectics and reality, the food that generates the deconstruction of the inherited and the breath of the intimate, that vital and transcendent intersection that brings together the creative process and its hermeneutics. Barat cultivates with obvious success the different genres literaryaimed at both children and adults and their literary career It is marked by numerous awards and recognitions. Common stylistic features are perceptible in all of them: clarity and classicism, combined to create a very personal literary universe, which sinks its roots in tradition to insert itself fully into the plunger of contemporaneity. Thus, in her poetry the science of the classics, the existential discourse, the echoes of memory and the lucidity of thought. This compilation of resources endows his works with veracity, but also brings us closer to territories where imagination becomes the essential protagonist. The historical and the mythical intertwine and weave a complex chain of situations that oscillate between the rigor of the documented and the ability to take us towards unexplored experiences.
‘If they ask about me’ evokes the natural character of poetic of Antonio Machado, carved without artifice, soaking us in a light air that turns the vertigo of living into backwater relaxation; infusing everyday life with a halo of luminous matter, a high-relief of signs that would have been left behind in the routine of the hours, in the ruin of the days, in the ‘time flies‘ of the years that, if they did not dwell in the word, would disappear proscribed in the most barren oblivion, so that everything that lives in the territories intact from childhood returns to our present offering us the opportunity to be happy “in the middle of the manure”. It is from this evocative convulsion that “The Sun of Childhood” is the first chapter of a book with four well-defined parts. The second, “love and geometry», brief in length, but cardinally sensitive, refers us to the intangible link that intersects the passion of love and the élan vital associated with the psychic instance or hypothetical force that Bergson closely relates to consciousness. A powerful parentheses which alone justifies the meaning of the book, “the reason without why of existence.”
«’If they ask for me’ evokes the natural character of Antonio Machado’s poetry…”
“Barro solo” is the title of the third part, a confessional daguerreotype of “someone who lives / with more pain than glory in the suburbs / of insignificance”; “a shadow among shadows” that refers us to Apollinaire y Bergamin; a weak atom condemned to oblivion and silence, to be the vain spoil of death; in incessant uncertainty about everything we do or fail to do when, finally, we will end up converted, inexorably, “into earth, into dust, into smoke, into shadow, into nothing”, recalling the sublime verse of Gongora; subjected to the ‘fatum’ of existence locked in the metaphors of mud, sepulchres, the eyes of sea bream, trampled jasmine, the grounds of the coffee cup, the old broken jug, the disharmony of the world, the wear and tear of love or the ephemeral image of childhood and innocence.
with the caption “The Neverending Story” Barat’s book closes. After the deep reflection of our meager existence, Barat reconstructs the sense of nonsense and appeals to motherhood, to faith, to I don’t know what remains stammering in the mystery of galaxies, to resurrection and eternal return, to virtuality from dreams, to love, the greatest conquest of the human species, despite the violence, the tragedy of existing, the promises that were not fulfilled and the cruel fate of homo Viatornavigator without compass, pilgrim of a disconcerted world that forces to refound the clamor of the great Góngora, of which the tremor of the ink, the loneliness of a shiver, remained as a luminous stigma. Juan Ramon Barat He is, without a doubt, one of the great names of our contemporary literature, which he demonstrates in each of his books, a clear example of a born talent and an unassailable will.
‘If they ask about me’
Author: Juan Ramón Barat.
Editorial: Renaissance . Seville, 2021.
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