Tovar, to write verses as a statement of loyalty to the past years according to his own conscience

“There are poets who raise their voice to say what they think and there are poets who use the silent word to penetrate what they know. E Tovar é two seconds. There are poets who hide from the center of things to speak about them and there are poets who search our surroundings to provide the silence that allows them to listen. And I’ll take two seconds ». That’s what the poet said so wisely Baldo Ramos (Celanova, Ourense 1971), which referred to his countryman Anton Tovar (Pereira, Rairiz de Veiga, 1921-Ourense, 2004) as a true voice associated with the addition of fashion and insight into the favorable moment. A voice that is not next year or the next — he has been among the favorite figures and proposals before the Royal Academy for several years — sooner rather than later he should star in the great festival of Galician letters. He, who never loved him, was in prison for hurting someone, nor was he in prison now.

But while the reader clings to this act of justification for those who have spent the last six years sad and immersed in anxiety, it is good to be able to enjoy this glorious poetry anthology prepared by Delfín Caseiro for Xerais Editions. One of his great supporters, Carlos Casares, said that “for Tovar, writing lyrics is an exercise in honesty and scrupulous fidelity with regard to his own conscience”, for which the bard, he assured, “belongs to the class of two philosopher writers, you are more concerned with the content than art form.” Daquela, Casares concluded, is a writer “out of fashion; What happens is that these poets are not concerned with fashion.

This is precisely why, among other things, as this new anthology proves, Tovar’s work does not remain valid until the end, the man who loces vizos malia or his pessimism.

His penchant for intimacy does not prevent two of his verses from overpowering poetry in defense of the language so valued by Xesús Alonso Montero, who in the prologue of this edition urges that “none, at this moment, has published sociolinguistic poems in the Galician language without access, emotion or drama and courage Antón Tovar’s Pentateuch”, which even alludes to how their countries — “beloved ignorants” — respected their own guilt. «Lonxe de seren revenge pamphlets (a completely legitimate genre in certain contexts), are always poetry; It’s about poetic texts that most often cannot be summarized nor is it possible to summarize them in professorial prose”, emphasizes Alonso Montero, knowing as a professor that good poetry always has something unattainable.