all about poetry, rich and habitable land

With this sentence, I would like to draw attention to the distance between you the meditative poetry of his first poems — these twists and turns of thought, which are translated into tortuous, all-embracing syntax — and the most dry and matter-of-fact tone, also impressionistic, of books like More allá, Tanger (2014), Heart orphan (2018) or unpublished Garden geography (2025), which inserts a final point – a moment – ​​into this “reunited poem”.

Valverde knows very well that writing is a reflection of life, of reality, and that what is desirable—and what I desire—requires precise and comprehensible wording. the richness and diversity of the world without caer en distortion or falsehood. In this sense, the “territory” to which the title refers is less relevant to the point of departure – Plasencia and Extremadura, omnipresent in these pages – than the cartographic works carried out together memory and languagethat is: for an idea.

The author says this in a poem that appears in the portico of this volume: “Hagamos de este lugar un terroir”. The place is nut; the territory is that which is loved over time, that which is created by a constant dialogue with this subjectivity that it leads reading and reading and perceptions that are the writer’s raw material. What matters most, e.g be careful, pay attention: “El afuera se encrusta en la fe del adentro. / La mirada se abre”.

You are impressed by it and agree with it TerritoryFor many years of continuous poetic creation, this is a huge coherence. The impression of unity that fills the voiceso recognizable to you from the first comparisons of the book, and especially in the poems Instead of praise (1987) y The waters held (1988): calm and closed – reticent – inclined to the matrix and significant details.

A voice that seamlessly breaks down into dramatic monologues that pay tribute to writers and artists (Robert Frost, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Willem de Kooningetc.) and which over time acquired brevity and sobriety. If the short poems of youth, so many deuders of contemporary culturalism, contain many exercises, the miniatures of this last age are an expression vital wisdom that has learned to make more decisions with much less.

Most of them are fleeting notes, notes from a travelogue (Ginebra, Tanger, Sofia…), and they contrast – not to dare – with the more extensive and widespread breathing of books, such as At a safe distance (1993), Ensaying circles (1995) or Earth mechanics (2002), focused on obsessive study landscape and familiar atmosphere: Plasencia with its busy streets and homes for the elderly, the riverside, the “enclave of the old water mill” that appears on many pages, the Vera district, the extreme interior of the dehesas…

As Gonzalo Hidalgo Bayal stated in his epilogue, “Each poem is valid for the same reason and is valid as a whole, but all poems have a different meaning.”. Yes Territory It’s a log after a few moments, the fruit of a loyalty sustained by a handful of obsessions and nurturing places that doesn’t limit until it’s enriched with doors within, turning richer, more spacious, and more inhabitable into its author’s world… and ours.

How the same is recorded is so impressive “Meditation in Valverde”one of the “recovered poems” that complete the volume is about giving “this uncertain reason why you end up in life.” Y follows.