Against the scum

According to Carl Gustav Jung, there is a collective unconscious from which we draw to obtain a shared wisdom, a pillar of reference that helps us enjoy basic cultural foundations. Taking this conception to its extreme, we reach the conclusion that we constantly draw upon other higher realities, as if, while living, we were nourished by Plato's world of ideas. "We don't write, a discourse is dictated to us," Bartomeu Fiol declared. Therefore, the poet, more than a creator, is a medium or, as Márius Sampere asserted, a demiurge, that is, an ambassador between realities or, more practically, a satellite dish that links the earthly plane with celestial orders. Robert Graves argued that the poet, perpetually in love, does nothing but wait and listen to the dictates of the White Goddess...

For its part, the new collection of poems by one of the undisputed and most exceptional seniors of Catalan poetry, Antoni Vidal Ferrando, and which is entitled Between two dark ones, is built from the certainty that there are beyonds that redeem these sad realities that surround us, soaked in funeral songs and crucified dreams, and that they can be accessed through full poetic consciousness. Such fullness is born from impressive paradoxical contrasts: each poem in this new collection published by Proa presents an avalanche of miseries and disasters – an approach that connects with other works of his, such as the previous one If fog comes in I'll have nowhere to go, Winner of the prestigious Carles Riba Prize, the lyrical discourse then relentlessly climbs the branches of a first hope, whether through a nostalgic retrospective look toward the past and the paradise of childhood, or toward the optimism of a better future. These are the subtle clarities that collide with the brutal darknesses that take refuge in the forms of a grand parenthesis: the nothingness of not yet having been born and the still-unknown change that death signifies.

It may be true that angels no longer sing when we read Quasimodo, Faulkner, or Woolf, but it is in the happy memory of the reader where the bastion of when the seraphim glorified each page as a visionary experience is established. Despite the proliferation of inclement weather, Antoni Vidal Ferrando, more messianic and merciless than ever, because he loves the world despite its shortcomings, manages to build gardens through words. With the wisdom, generosity, and expressive skill that have characterized his great work until now, the titan from Santanyí offers us his particular sense of life, reading, and writing in a twilight yet resplendent work. One of the essential volumes of this rentrée literary but also of all of 2025.