An alter ego of mine wrote somewhere that I wanted to make poetry a linguistic device which is both deserving of attention and able to turn emotions into memorable words. It wasn't exactly a dictionary definition –but more a declaration of personal principles which synthesises some of the things that I have discovered (or decided) over the period of a good number of years (a very good number now, in fact) of intermittent but stubborn poetical practice. Things like the fact that for me (and to help me to make my point) poetry only exists in poems. Or that the poem (more than the book or the verse) is my basic unit of meaning. And that a poem, like all other devices, is the work of the person who puts their name to it. But having said that, there is always something else—be it a touch of wit, an angel's wing or a secret fire. The strength of a poem lies simply in its words and its silences, and so good poetry can only be written by one who is in love with the words, the silence and the combination of both; sentiment, (a word which today is devalued, dangerous and essential) forms the basis (but only the basis) of many of my poems. And that sentiment, (anger, fear, worry, yearning, love, pity) dissolves into rhythm and words and finds a new form in the experience of being read. There is no crown more desirable than an enduring memory (fleeting though it may be) in the mind of someone else.

People have said that I write detailed or intimist poetry. I cannot disagree with that if those details, if that intimacy, follow the path of what a Spanish poet has written: “The world was painted in a single stroke. Anyone can recognise the stroke of that brush in a water course and in the ribs of a tree trunk; in the graininess of sand and in the clouds; in a drop of ink which dissolves in water, a puff of smoke that dissolves in the air; in the immobile jellyfish. In the path of a river from outer space traces the line of the tide on the beach. The roots of the trees trace those of the blood. The vortex of the plughole is the typhoon and it is the shell".

What can I add? Maybe that I started reading Salvat-Papasseit and Màrius Torres in the Ariel editions of the seventies. And then I had the feeling that Jaime Gil de Biedma and Gabriel Ferrater were showing me another path, along which I would later find Luis Cernuda, and where even today I cannot cease to admire the still little-read works by Josep Carner, to mention just a few of our deceased. As for the rest, I have no shame in remembering Machado with scholarly nostalgia; translating Heaney, Anne Sexton and R.S. Thomas with great enthusiasm; eagerly listening to boleros and standards and, among everything else, envying the literary career of Elvis Costello.