A sunbeam like a sob of pink grapes

For quite some time now, I have considered Ramon Ramon one of the most outstanding authors in contemporary Catalan literature. I have enthusiastically acclaimed his works such as the exceptional Els temps interromputs from Edicions del Buc and I read his diaries with the same eagerness that drives me to canonical titles in the genre, such as those provided by Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Feliu Formosa, and Lluís Maicas. The latest volume in Ramon Ramon's experiential cycle was the striking and inspiring L’any dels cinquanta. Dietari 2020 from Lleonard Muntaner, Editor. It is a very ambitious work that confirms him as a true master of precision. Far from turning the COVID confinement or reaching fifty into mere autobiographical motives, the wise writer transforms such experiences, the collective and the personal, into pillars that propel him towards a gaze that expresses itself with clairvoyant lucidity on the passage of time, the current situation of the Catalan Countries through ultra-local landscapes with universal echoes, the act of writing in this harsh 21st century, and the fragile human condition. Few intelligences have the power to elevate the quotidian to the category of a refined, shared idea, and Ramon Ramon is a wise and eloquent possessor of it.Ramon Ramon returns to verses, good news, with Mar de Xeraco from Edicions 96, in which the poet transforms a specific place in the geography of the Valencian Country into a mythical space endowed with extraordinary literary density, demonstrating that true universality is born from eyes that take deep roots. The sea, the clarity, the paths, and the silences do not appear as simple descriptive elements but as thought forms, as Perejaume would say. Ramon Ramon explores a moral territory from which he tenaciously questions memory, the cruelty of History, and the persistent persistence of beauty in a world subjected to constant changes. Ramon Ramon returns to a writing of contained but atrocious elegance, precise to the extreme, capable of turning each mental pearl into a powerful philosophical intuition and each apparently minor episode into a revelation about the human being. Ramon Ramon's literature advances by sedimentation, faithful to the rhythms of revelation, without superfluous ornaments or erudite displays, but with an emotion that soaks everything with the same tremendous force of waves that bring joy and also death. It is not superfluous to re-mind, to return things to the heart according to Blai Bonet, that Mar de Xeraco can also be read as a tribute to the longed-for Josep Piera, a Mediterranean titan.Each page of Mar de Xeraco by Ramon Ramon at Edicions 96 seems to want to make us aware that writing is, above all, a way of learning to look, and that in chaos we can find wonders that console us.