The religion of memories

Vincles,, by Feliu Formosa, in the prestigious Jardins de Samarcanda collection by Cafè Central, is a wonderfully lucid and moving book, a work in which the poet seems to want to stitch back together the essential threads of existence. The thirty-two poems that make up the volume, written in hexasyllables, recover a meter that the author had already explored in the Llibre de les meditacions and which here acquires a new, more restrained breath and, nevertheless, of high intensity. The book is read under the light of Cançoner, one of his masterpieces, and such importance is explicitly underscored in the note that closes the volume. It is not, therefore, a conventional retrospective exercise, but rather a purely poetic operation: returning to one's own life to discover what persists and which words can still give form to what has been lived.Feliu Formosa writes from his current situation in a nursing home, and memory continuously opens doors to other times and spaces, to decisive episodes of his trajectory, and to figures who have left deep imprints. The lectureship in Heidelberg during the 1959-1960 academic year, Maria Plans, Turin, or other psychogeographic places appear as beacons of an intimate cartography in which facts and corners are repositories of identity. This ability to make the present moment coexist with the successive layers of the past gives the book a special density: every memory is a way of reliving what seemed buried, lost.Maria Enrich's prologue aptly accompanies this new and precious poetic foray, while the presences of Bertolt Brecht and Joan Vinyoli place Vincles within a literary genealogy that the genius from Sabadell invokes not only from erudition but above all from a creative fraternity. Brecht is a beneficial tutelary shadow, a conscience that helps to exalt civil and expressive possibilities, and the winks to Vinyoli, from the very title, are tributes to a master and a friend. Vincles invites us to reconnect apparently paradoxical realities: the now and the yesterday, but also the poet and those elements that have grounded a powerful life itinerary. Deep down, it is a work about the need to re-mem-ber in the primordial sense that Blai Bonet gave to this verb: to pass through the heart again that which was lived so that it does not disappear completely. Formosa converts such a need into a form of creation and, also, into a form of consolation: poetry cannot restore lost time, no, but it can rescue its supreme melodies, it can resignify the vestiges and ensure that a life, by being evoked and recreated, continues to generate beauty. ‘Vincles, a serene and deeply moving work, confirms Feliu Formosa as one of the great living masters of Catalan poetry, a titan among us.