Building the House of Poetry: Tugs in the Fog

Joan Margarit is one of Catalonia’s leading contemporary poets. Born in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, Margarit grew up during the Franco era, a time when the public use of Catalan was banned. He wrote his early poetry in Castilian but turned to Catalan in the early 1980s, rapidly establishing a reputation as a significant poetic voice. Margarit’s work as an architect and professor of architecture (he helped design buildings for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992) has had a profound influence on his writing, as the title of his 2005 book, Structural Calculations, attests. The life and death of his daughter Joana, who was born with a rare and disabling genetic condition, has also profoundly impacted Magarit’s work. As Tugs in the Fog attests, Margarit is an important poet with a substantial body of work, and we should be grateful to Anna Crowe for translating a fine selection of his poems into unobtrusively poetic English.
As Crowe says in her introduction, these poems are distinguished by their emotional directness and immediacy. This is very much in line with Margarit’s explicit poetics: ‘poetry, [...] at least of the kind that interests me, [...] is the strictly personal, I would say almost secret, ordering of one’s own suffering, of what we are when we are alone’ (Tugs in the Fog, p.9). The ‘Joana’ poems are perhaps the rawest expression of this, but we find a similar impulse throughout. ‘Self-Portrait’ and ‘The Oracle’, for example, explore the poet’s considerable reserves of guilt and anxiety. Overall, the range of emotions explored in the poems is broad. Margarit is, among other things, a subtle and idiosyncratic love poet, as in ‘Raymond Chandler’:

In each of us there is a crime novel.
Grief stands in for crime, and love for a woman
is the novel’s hard and honest detective.

Even here, though, we are not far away from suffering, loss, and death. Anna Crowe, whilst acknowledging this, argues that ‘[l]ike a Rembrandt drawing, it is the darkness, the shading, that inform and intensify the light, and Margarit reminds us that it is not death we have to understand, but life’ (Tugs in the Fog, p.13). True enough; but the poet clearly has a strong urge to probe the mystery of death, chart the moment when ‘the things we know become/ symbols of things unknown’ (‘Es Pujol’). It’s hard to resist the conclusion that for Margarit, death is often – to quote a very different poet – the mother of beauty.
The emotional impact of the poems derives as much from style as from subject. Margarit sees concision as a fundamental virtue, indeed a necessary condition, of poetry: ‘the only thing that characterises [poetry] and differentiates it from prose is concision and exactness’ (TF, p.10). There is certainly a spare quality, an avoidance of rhetorical flourish in his work – it’s tempting to describe it as a poetry of statement, albeit statement that is often enlivened by vivid and sometimes powerful metaphors. ‘Final Notice’ exemplifies the characteristic shift from plain, almost prosaic, style to an equally plain, but telling image:

I don’t want to be docile now I’m growing old,
but being an old rebel is even more pointless.
Lucidity is part of the coldness
and now love is in your silence.
The future is left dumb as a tap
when the pipes have frozen.

As one would expect of an architect, Margarit is very much a poet for whom the visible world exists. We see this in his use of metaphor and in his evocation of place. The sea, for instance, is a recurring element in the poems: beaches, islands, ships all play an important symbolic role (the hospital ship as a symbol of death, an ‘armour-plated and grey Charon’, in ‘On a beach in the Aegean’ comes to mind). Margarit can be situated – indeed, situates himself – within a tradition of poets of the Mediterranean stretching back to Homer, who is a frequent point of reference in the poems.
Perhaps the most pervasive spatial presence in his work, though, is Barcelona, whose streets and parks provide an often brooding backdrop to the human drama of the poems: ‘Morning in Montjuïc cemetery’, for instance, sees the poet crossing a waste ground ‘where junkies wander/ like statues made from rags’. Houses and interiors also appear frequently in the poems, often with clear symbolic resonance:

They will bear a great deal, they say, not talking about
the flats but themselves [...]
People and walls are living together and cracking.
Black verdigris has rotted at one and the same
time the souls, the ceilings and terraced roofs
where the newly-retired are planting camellias.

As one might expect, then, building – as noun and participle, entity and activity – is a foundational metaphor in Margarit’s work, offering a paradigm for poetry itself: ‘I try to have my poems fulfil what Coderch, who was my teacher, told me a house should be: “Neither independent, nor made in vain, nor original, nor sumptuous.”’ (TF, p.9)
Given the immediacy of many of the poems, it’s easy to overlook the importance of ‘structural calculations’ in Margarit’s work. But they are in fact crucial and pervasive. In individual poems, great attention is given to the placing of images, and to the weight and impact of the ending. We see this in particularly brutal form in ‘The Oracle’, which starts with the child’s memory of a slaughterhouse, then shifts to Delphi, where ‘the message/ of the red jet gushing into the jug/ [...] was difficult and obscure’, before ending thus:

You’ve spent
forty years trying to understand it.
You’re doing that now, pissing blood.

The architectonics of the book as a whole is equally impressive. Anna Crowe’s artful ordering of the poems foregrounds a multitude of links and echoes. For instance, the treasure island motif in ‘Love and Time’ (‘Love, which has replicated in your eyes/ the clarity of the treasure island’) is picked up in the title of the following poem...and then reappears much later, with a whole new cargo of associations, in the excellent ‘Farewell’, in which the poet evokes the vanished Tenerife of his youth.
These recurrences reveal the unity and coherence of Margarit’s poetic world, adding depth of field, as it were, to our reading of individual poems. The meticulous concern for form, for working out the precise weighting and placing of motifs, in fact adds to the emotional impact of the poems. The ‘feeling intelligence’ that generates and informs the poems is complemented and completed by the structural calculations of the poet-architect.

Robin Mackenzie