Retaule de Nova York
Poetry , 2014
Ara Llibres
Pages: 80
Poems and refrains punctuated along a moving sidewalk space-time mural of New York City: the good, ugly, tender, and hard. Rhythmic clamor and musical riffs embedded in the strokes and colors of the accompanying artwork. The engaging English translation complete with rhyme and alliteration, inherent and essential to the poems. With a downbeat of “Earthy sewer fumes” the dance begins, to lace together earth and sky, solid and vapor. Enter the metro of mysticisms, opening to tender human truths. Writers and musicians; dreams and imagination; memory and forgetting; a collective creative force harnesses survival.
“A beautiful book of nine poems by nine illustrations—in fact eighteen, the illustrations are diptychs, an exercise in variations, of what Leibniz calls identitas in varietate. To the formal fluctuation is added the chromatic, and the drift could be seasonal, I would say from spring to autumn. The tableaux is made of an odd number of pieces, with centrality and symmetries. Tableaux as a mnemonic locus, as a figure of the world.
“Valentí Gómez i Oliver is a great connoisseur of the history of thought and spirituality and is also very fond of the traditional arts of strategy and its iconographic tricks. An altarpiece “tableaux”—an interior façade in the form of a compartmentalized cove, where various figures are placed around the main one. The wise old fox Valentí has placed his pieces with devilish skill, and even with some foul mood. The inadvertent reader can be confused by the apparent heterogeneity of the elements, ranging from classical antiquity to the heroes of the pulp and today. As in a carnival, they parade through the text: Pound, Guggenheim, Crane, Lorca, Warhol, Madoff, Obama; but also Poe, Freud, Pavese, Gilgamesh. In this fascinating poetic text the characters are drawn from Hellenic and Christian orthodoxy, and also from art and thought in general, from the Gnostics, the Cabal, Esotericism, Freemasonry.” —Miquel de Palol, excerpts from a review in the Catalan paper, El Punt, and from a presentation at Blanquerna, Catalan Cultural Center in Madrid