Wild Creature

In “Reasons and ways,” the Catalan poet Joan Margarit (1938–2021) suggests how love for the real world underlies his work as a poet and how such love permits him to approach his own death with dispassionate understanding:

I value what’s real: iron when it was being forged 
into a nail or a plough, any feeling that I
can recognise in a clean and clear shape.
But I’m also fascinated to understand what it means 
for me to become quite soon oblivion in the shape 
of a handful of dust inside a galaxy.

The austere, straightforward poems of Wild Creature, Anna Crowe’s translation of the final two collections by Margarit, achieve a grave, Heraclitean beauty—“this humble / presocratic poet I would like / to have become”—and demonstrate how old age, while no guarantee of wisdom, can provide a serene lucidity about human nature. In “Wild Creature,” the octogenarian poet declares:

I am getting to know better and better
the inner wilderness where each ends up alone
and with one conviction:
understanding is the only ennobling thing.

In “The two snowfalls,” Margarit reflects on how the year when chemotherapy “has not succeeded / in curing me of this lymphoma,” is paradoxically “one of the happiest of my life.” This happiness arises from a hard-earned understanding of what matters: in the poet’s case, his partner Raquel, their late daughter, his impoverished childhood during the Spanish Civil War, his vocation as an architect who worked on the Sagrada Família, and the practice of making and contemplating art. Wild Creature bestows the gift of wisdom that poetry offers those who labor to receive it, which proves inseparable from love itself:

Today the only thing that speaks to me is a voice 
rising up out of the hardness of life itself,
the only one in which I find some truth:
music, covering nothingness with beauty,
poems I have written,
the strength of love and the word together.