Jon Benito premiered ten years ago with a solid and compact book (Anchors in the Streams, Susa, 2001). This narrative impulse is also written with the same elegance. He paints us, accurately, as painters affected by obsession, the loves of our generation. Jon Benito resists tears and stridence. He talks to us, but he doesn't throw words in your face.

I have imagined the zarautz to a perfect match of Baskonia that he loves so much, because his clipboard generates the pleasure that a good play generates: the rhythm of the poems, the weight of the stories is calculated. In this one hundred and eleven page story, he wonders, “Who am I?” At first he shows us the framework: he dissects the family, the place of origin, the people and the culture to clear the accounts, deeper than a chronicler, and better than a poet. This attempt to explain experiences is not metaphysical, but rather fractional, made with passionate details: “The last corner of spring is broken. Hondarribia Airport. Then Joshua and Joshua joined the army.” With great beauty, with the beauty of the hard,

Benito penetrates, little by little, into the waters of what is not understood, into the explanations of what they do not understand, into the things that have changed forever: after singing to the family and to the place of origin –a little previsible and soft some of the poems–, he explores the two aspects of love with tenderness and emotion and begins his journey towards the Interior, under the protection of the third person: “He left his house, he left everything, to see what he was in the world.” This journey ends in a classic way, with that old feeling that Kavafis brought to the poem The City (1910): “You don’t have new places, you don’t have another sea of eden. The city will follow you. You’ll be walking the same streets. And you will grow old in the same quarters; and you will get blue in the same houses.” Jon Benito then returns from the trip, lands gently, and the new Coordinate begins the last part.

The shortest poems in the book may not go beyond play and artifice, but the long-breathing poems have struck me as memorable. Jon Benito’s futures come from deep beginnings, and the most intimate reflections offer us long and soft. A sweet Purgatory is a book in which the Impulse, the silent catastrophe, is much more than what is written.