Todos los rostros del pasado

Francisco Brines is a central name of our poetry. A member of the Generation of 50 and awarded the 2020 Cervantes Prize, his work oscillates between the song of paradise lost and the wise acceptance of earthly gifts, melancholy at the passage of time and the joy of the present hour. This anthology, prepared by the poet and critic Dionisio Cañas, gathers a wide selection of a serene and coherent work that starts from an intense elegiac awareness - expressed in Las brasas (1960), his first book, in elegant white hendecasyllables - to culminate, in The Autumn of the Roses (1986) and The Last Coast (1995), in a serious and sententious writing, capable of capturing the beauty of decline and assent to the arrival of death. Born from the mixture of intuition and thought, Brines's poetry feeds on opposites that, precisely because they are, relentlessly spin the poles of death and life, desire and disenchantment, memory and oblivion, childhood. and senescence, the splendor of the young body and the end of that youth. Nature also appears -that Mediterranean that stretches from the Greece of love to his native Valencia-, which is the backdrop, always renewed, of the poet's slow entry into nothingness. Carlos Barral declared when The Autumn of the Roses was published that its author was already 'a classic'. Time has only confirmed his judgment, opening this poetry to new generations of readers who have found comfort and knowledge in it.