“I understand that for ten years I have been saying goodbye to hours and moons… My last books of poems were pointing that way. But I come back again and again to pick up the fountain pen… The other I that I am gets irritated and doesn’t want to shut up. He is unheard of”, the writer José Luis Rodríguez García (León, 1949–Zaragoza, 2022) said just a year before his death. Despite his complicated health in recent times, he never stopped writing. In just two years, three posthumous books have appeared: the novel ‘Sombras en la Bajamar’ (Comuniter, 2023), the collection of poems ‘Tenderness was possible’ (August Fourth, 2023) and now ‘In the magnificent late hour’ is published. , in Comuniter, again, in a collection directed by Adolfo Burriel.
The poet and professor David Mayor, one of José Luis Rodríguez’s best friends and in some way his executor in collaboration and complicity with Mar Alastrué (widow of the writer), prologues and presents this collection of poems where the poet “It appears out in the open, defeated, contradictory, doomed to the absurd, barely voiceless,” says Mayor, who at the same time points out that “this book is an event.” José Luis Rodríguez García wrote in notebooks, usually with a fountain pen. And, in these poems, he seems to dialogue with himself, that other who was at the bottom of the mirror and consciousness, and with poets as beloved as Paul Celan and Friedrich Hölderlin, to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, republished in 2024 by the PUZ in its usual two volumes: ‘Friedrich Hölderlin: the exile on earth’.
David Mayor points out that the compositions of ‘In the magnificent late hour’ are poems “that intensely condense the poetic thought of an intellectual whose work overflows with nuances and never ceases to appeal to us.” He adds that they are “poems of water, wind and humidity, symbols that allow us to think about how to enter a time that is discontinuity, metaphor, translation, displacement, at the same time similarity and rupture; time of memory and perception, but also dissolution of expectations and hope.”
In his reading, Mayor assures that “they are not poems of madness, or not entirely, but they are poems written when all that remains is to say goodbye.” In the last text of the group, pessimism (or perhaps fear, the consciousness of ending) surrounds the poet, who continues to dialogue with himself in the manner of Luis Cernuda: “You write that it is useless to live. / And that word will remain light, tinged with insurmountable sadness.”
David Mayor says that they are “poems of water, wind and humidity, symbols that allow us to think about how to enter a time that is discontinuity, metaphor, translation, displacement, at the same time similarity and rupture; time of memory and perception, but also dissolution of expectations and hope.”
With more than a dozen collections of poems behind him and around 50 in his total production (he wrote short stories, psychological, historical and police novels, numerous essays, biographies), José Luis Rodríguez achieved, for many, his best achievements in poetry. And this is a book full of confidences, searches and omens of someone who senses death, or at least feels very harassed by illness, a poet who sings to memory, to the earth, to writing itself, to dream of escape (“that flight, to nowhere”) and of love, as happens in that poem that begins like this: “I loved her, because she arrived with the fragile smell of the poppy” and concludes: “Goodbye, beautiful fortune teller” . None of the poems, by the way, have titles.
“I know you’re hanging around me / but I’m going to keep the appointment.” Another capital issue is the ending seen: “I write about our death. Nothing else. / We loved the laughter of the fire / and, now, they expose our ashes for those who will come.” And all of this wrapped in beauty, in her usual surrealism, in her inexhaustible and dazzling imagination and in a constant veneer of melancholy. “I would like to be the melancholy of water / or a cry that the barbarism of the air exalts.”
Surely it was that and much more. A great teacher with many students who remember his teaching, his humanity and sensitivity; a passionate citizen who never turned his back on politics, collaborated in many media (in recent years in the opinion pages of HERALDO) and a committed writer who was always willing to live with pleasure and tenderness “the immense afternoon with friends.” ”.
By the way, Rosendo Tello has just died at the age of 93. José Luis Rodríguez confessed to HERALDO that he read, among others, very regularly Fernando Ferreró, David Mayor and the aforementioned author of ‘Meditations at Midnight’. The book will be presented on Thursday the 13th, at the María Moliner Library, with Adolfo Burriel and David Mayor.
THREE POEMS
I cry, nobody
understand this emptiness of sundays
who will speak of the seduction of the tides
that drag me
like to the antiquarian the enigma of a miniature.
Seize the softness without questions
Of the sand
why I was born to tell
I discover buried wood
and I offer it like a bronze.
*****
The papers fly, my dreams,
caresses are twisted. Oh,
wind
drag the glare, leave it on the table
the shadowless signature,
that invents colors
that have no name.
*****
The wind passes by, like a shadow without fingers.
It destroys everything, and I close my eyes.
Lose fear of its devastation:
behold the glory of life
