Admonition of the cyclical. <i>Presentación y memorial para un monumento</i> by J.Á. Valente

Presentación y memorial para un monumento (1970) represents a sort of minor parenthesis within José Ángel Valente poetic production, accompanying the few other experimental detours in the 1960s. Nevertheless, this short book brings together past and future tensions of Valente’s poetics, radicalising certain aesthetic choices such as the use of interpolated texts, excerpta and the use of an anonymising mask while defining, in a definitive and innovative manner, the social aspect of his poetry, which will evolve in a metapoetic mode. The collection stands as a bitter anamnesis of the evils of an ideologically occupied language, a poignant photograph of the present in which theses poems were written and a warning for the future.