Nothing better expresses the dogma through which literature becomes religion than the idea that everything ends in a book. But maybe the truth is the opposite, maybe it all starts in a book. Not the book of nature that the medievals read, nor the book of personal destinies that the superstitious read.
Something more random, more fluid, more intermittent. Words that float in the air: the breeze that is “breeze”, the snow that is “snow” and both that are also the poem. The permanent double meaning, the exterior and the interior that are sought, found, repelled and sought again in a dimension in which the sentimental is not different from the verbal.
In the poems that make up the beautiful Winter summer by Carlos Surghi, Proust’s world can return in a swarm of bees and the word “mountain” derives from a kind of reptilian etymology.
This means that there is no ontological distinction between the animate and the inanimate or between things and words in his verses. Time and space are combined in sensitive formulas: melancholy, love or involuntary memory. In that sense, winter and summer are his intimate seasons.
As an intermittent biographer of himself (a self assimilated and torn from diverse landscapes), Surghi is always discreet, that is, fragmentary, a poet of insinuation and blank spaces.
- Winter summer. Poems. Carlos Surghi. Lost Edge Editor. Cordoba 2023
