Mikel Etxaburu has taken the Bilbao Blas de Otero Poetry Award in this book Lo zaudete (Erein, 2016). The firefly doesn't have to be the sun. “It seems quite clear to see itself; and it is enough not to forget who it is.” The firefly lights are all of a sudden streetlights. Urban but referenced to nature, hopeful but pale, slow in the area, the book is an appeal to be aware of things. Etxaburu is not interested in the sublimation or height of the sky, he prefers the view of the earth. The author himself said: “Poetry has that hammer to transform reality. For me, it's that poetry: reflecting in poems that step to look at. What is that step? Of consciousness.”

And in the confusion of poetic and social consciousness, it runs through the streets, both indoor and outdoor, with open eyes, and not so much the eyes themselves. This is how the inhabitants of the night rebel, the renters of the ATMs, our ghosts, to which we have made invisible: “The sun has come out./ The wooden seats of the seats are occupied,/ are always occupied,/ and are always the same/ those occupied by the wooden seats”.

So the strands of this book multiply to create the spider's web of images of the city. This spider web is a kind of personal fiction that brings together experiences and the present in a fairly real way, with a rather reflexive lyricism.

Light and shadow, self and others, time and memory also come from one side and the other. That desires the poem a whole, grateful once, a monotonous moment. As you slept, I opened your eyes more than a thinker's book of poems, the thought of a poet. Beauty, rhythm, word -- they're second-order compared to other virtues. Criticism, emotion, empathy… are the things that Etxaburu rejects, and often that despair, the need to say something, is what complicates and confuses the poem, in the metaphors of the mute doubts: “And you’d like to keep the waves in the bathtub,/ but it’s too late, the bathtub is leaking and/ the sea has escaped from your bathroom.”

This is not as fresh as Zu zara orain txoria (Elkar, 2011) and Hodeiak zapatetan (Susa, 2014), it is not so round. In them he read, like a river, and his readings were natural. I found this work more forced, a waste of energy.