The poet and editor Àngels Marzo (Caldes de Montbui, 1977) has published El rastre nival (Pagès Editors), a book that presents a kind of history of humanity in a hundred pages, like still photos that move. And it is that in fact photography was part of her development, as she herself recounts: “The origin of the book was a documentary about Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had a way of conceiving his art that I really like, stolen images, it is In other words, not so much chasing the image but letting the images be the ones that question you at a certain moment”.
When he had a few poems, he realized that “they had a kind of thematic nucleus that was like a universal collection of poems, because there were poems that made reference to different continents. So I was pulling the thread, and I realized that all the poems revolved around circumstances of the 20th century that for some reason had touched me and I had felt the need to enter them from my point of view or try to justify poetically by What had caught my attention? But he realized that it was “the most impersonal thing I had ever written, and then I wondered how I could put myself. Global history is one thing and microhistory another, and I used my family tree to signify myself as a part of this decadent 20th century and we'll see where it ends”. That poem was the one that gave the book its name.
But it was not all done. “I was reading a book by anthropologist Rebecca Wragg Skyes about Neanderthals,” he recalls. It caught my attention and I thought I could complicate it a little more. And it occurred to me that the beginning of the book was to go to a time far ahead of this 20th century at the moment in which a type of life is already expired, is already about to become extinct. Then I still had more problems. How do I project myself to where you want to know or cover? By those coincidences in life I found the news where they explained that the International Space Station would be thrown off a cliff at the so-called Nemo Point”. Because yes, it begins with some Neanderthals who have "the final awareness that this is over" and closes with "the end of a way of understanding the 20th century and of an artifact that from the heights, where theoretically we will have to go if we want to survive, it has recorded some of the most paradigmatic moments, and the fact that this space observatory also ends up off a cliff seemed powerful enough to finish the book.
They are narrative poems and relatively long, because "many times it is the poem that asks for its space, he commands," he points out.
In the book there is also a heartfelt tribute to Joan Margarit, whom he considers his teacher and whom he had "the luck and opportunity to meet." When the poet died, he “didn't know it would be so bad. I cried so much That poem came out in a gush after I had cried, I think, for two days in a row, and the only way to console myself in some way was to write this poem about some of his verses, ”he explains.
In any case, Marzo does not think "if poetry saves from something or what function it has": "The only thing I know is that Homer already wrote verses, we are in the 21st century and we still do it: it must have some utility, at least for some people".
He also remembers the words of a "good critic and friend" who told him that "he had written a very good and very ugly book": "Because it is not kind, the things it deals with are rather ugly, yes. It is a wake-up call so that we stop to think about what history has taught us, memory, and whether it is worth remembering or not. If we renounce our roots or memory we are going towards absolute chaos”.
Catalan version, here
