Both in the blind fog and in the middle of the night, in search of what was or what never was, where is Maixa Zugasti going (Tolosa, 1973)? You can't tell. The unified skeleton of the leaves intertwines three parts of this compact Silence, Word and Noise. Silence can be the most sonorous symptom. Words often say little. And the noise can sometimes be Nick Caven's refrain by asking "Do you love me?"
He quotes and quotes Cave, Felipe Juaristi, or Caballero Bonald, or Baudelaire, or Margarit. Each of the phrases contributed to the book is worth it, these poems or fragments of songs are one of the sources of satisfaction of the poem: Fran Pérez, Maiz, Rodríguez Castellón, María Zambrano... Through these quotes the pages breathe, as in the area many of the pieces are heavy and diffuse, all abombated, all memory, all fatigue: “Unify the leaf skeleton in autumn./ I will close my eyes/ sleep thirst/ and I will fill in memories./ We will be the only eternal skin/ very dark night/ freshly asleep”.
In Maixa Zugasti's universe, the future itself also has a point of melancholy, the blue taste of the empty bed. I think the unified skeleton of the leaves is a book of poems about waiting, but after all, the point of hope is death. It seems at times a manifesto of those who fell in love with the Moon: “I no longer need a key to enter this house built on ashes.”
They're poems, in a way, confidential, but not private. The writer has been hidden in classical forms and fairly universal images, and his experience moves to the four winds: new fertile bushes, a soft piano sound in the bar-zuloa, Gernika under bomb, the repetition of funeral bells...
Maixa Zugasti will drive you in brown, turbid, deeper and deeper tones. However, a kind of apathy can catch you and confuse you among the messages filled for the first time. Although aesthetically worked and perfectly written, the leaf skeleton is unified in purity of repetition, in dark, overly monotonous atmospheres. Poems may be different, but the underlying current is always one.
Party and recreation. Oral History of Rock Radical Vasco
Javier 'Jerry' Corral
Books, 2025
------------------------------------------------
Javier Corral ‘Jerry’ was a student of the first Journalism Promotion of the UPV, along with many other well-known names who have... [+]