The cleanings

The concept of ablution refers to a cleaning process to achieve spiritual purification in both the Catholic and Muslim religions, and it is also one of the sublimation phases of the canonical alchemical process. Now the admired and beloved poet Miquel Bezares reinvents it for his new volume of poems: Les ablucions at AdiA Edicions, a label that has bet on him with an unusual fervor, since the author born in Llucmajor has published Els voltants d’Olívia, Mal pas, El col·leccionista and Cleveland. Thanks to the pages of Les ablucions we witness the avatars of a loving relationship with all its multiple sediments, undergrowth, and submarine layers. A desire is made explicit there that seems anthropological, ancestral, primordial, foundational, telluric, cosmic. However, despite the acknowledged love, the danger of the irreconcilable separation that exists between bodies and consciences imposes itself, a distance that shelters the violent clash of opposites, much like everything that separates forest from sea. Thus, a whole series of opposing binomials begins, advancing in parallel to other contrasts: you/I, light/shadow, and breathing/existing. Les ablucions by Bezares is a book full of sincerity, but also of figuration: the elaborate expressiveness combines highly metaphorical language and approachable prosody. Undoubtedly, the poems are markedly symbolic and draw from troubadour roots, but also from metaphysical spirituality, and in the end, they can be read as timeless love letters. The lovers' setting is one of exaltation and passion for a nature that equalizes and that in no case is related to the devastation of our landscapes due to real estate speculation and tourist massification. For this reason, Les ablucions seems an oasis, a utopia, or rather, an anti-dystopia that surprises due to its audacity and its defense of non-human life forms, much like the persevering and obstinate fungi of slow but magnificent efficacy, an idea that can be related to the apocalyptic series The Last of Us.

Another equally important foundation is the vindication of the power of creation and complication, bastions that propose more complex empathetic networks and deeper relational systems. Having highlighted the content, it is now necessary to underline the form: perfect decasyllables without rhyme but with a great deal of rhythm and a musicality that does not renounce internal echoes and resonances, much like subtle rhymes. To this are added beautiful and atavistic archaic expressions that draw an atmosphere that unites classicism with postmodernism and a most meticulous structure: sequences of nine poems plus a coda to achieve ten in five differentiated groups that perpetrate 50 poems, fair, exact, precise as axes or as fishing rods. Les ablucions confirms, clearly, that Miquel Bezares is already a modern classic.