Poetry for dark times
A collection of poems about the Spanish Civil War resonates fiercely today
‘REFLECTIONS THROUGH THE CONVEX MIRROR OF TIME: POEMS IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR’ By E.A. Mares
University of New Mexico Press (2022, 180 pp.)
The Fallen Angel — known by many names such as the devil or Lucifer — looms over these poems written in commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, presented here both in English and Spanish.
The author stands in contemplation of the Fallen Angel sculpture
by Ricardo Bellver atop a pedestal in the Retiro Park, in Madrid: “As night cascades down,/the Fallen Angel
remembers/how he pushed the generals/to murder la joven bonita,/the young, beautiful/Spanish Republic.” The statue seems still to exult in the
hideous chaos he has provoked, and waits, notes the poet, for that next opportunity when “the hearts of violent persons… will calve like glaciers/ and explode from ice into a war/coming to you somewhere soon.”
Mares (1938-2015) was an Albuquerque-based poet and social activist who traveled often to Spain. He was deeply moved by the legacy of that cataclysmic struggle (1936-1939) between a democratically elected republic and
the fascist coup d’etat engineered by General Francisco Franco. The war
invited Nazi Germany to try out its aerial weapons over Guernica, in the Basque region, immortalized by Picasso’s haunting painting, and indeed set the murderous civilian toll of the world war that followed. Franco’s dictatorship endured until his death in 1975.
In that now familiar cauldron of ideologies vying against one another, liberals, fascists, communists, nationalists,
loyalists, bishops, socialists, anarchists, republicans, the poet laments: “We
lurch from civil war/within ourselves to total war…. I say even the geraniums/need water and food.”
Mares was steeped in the work of the leftist revolutionary poets who were jolted into political engagement by the war: Rafael Alberti, Pablo
Neruda, Antonio Machada and, especially, Frederico García Lorca, who was rounded up and shot by firing squad in 1936. Mares devotes an entire section to Lorca’s death by the cowardly fascists (whom he names) cursed forever for their heinous deed: “Lorca
sped away in an instant/from vengeful relatives,/from cretin politicians and
generals,/from his know-nothing torturers,/from the darkness, the frozen night/that descended on Spain.”
These revolutionary poets embraced forms of “protest, denunciation and solidarity,” writes Susana Rivera in a scholarly Epilogue about the poetry of the war — and like them, Mares “channeled his anger and compassion to write beautiful
poems.” (Rivera is the wife of Angel González, a post-Civil War Spanish poet whom Mares admired and translated — another angel.) Mares was a young organizer for the Students for
a Democratic Society and authored volumes of poetry (“Astonishing Light: Conversations I Never Had with Patrociño Barela”) as well as a play about Padre Martínez. In this book, he aimed
to write “a panoramic vision” of the Spanish Civil War, a “poem with wings
to cover/the distance between then and now.” His angel, explains Rivera, would be a “fiercely human angel.”
As a second-generation poet of the war, who identified with the “children of wrath,” Mares took cues in his own
life from the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, an Okie who sang about the
downtrodden amid America’s Dust Bowl: “He was ordinary/like his people, as ordinary/as clean water, warm
bread, cold beer.” In his poem “Woody at the Jarama Front,” the poet channels Guthrie’s rousing anthems in a tribute
to the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade, made up of American volunteers among others, who “died by the
hundreds/in the valley of the Jarama River,” in February 1937. Mares was much taken by the “romance” of those international volunteers to fight tyranny in Spain.
As he meanders about a modern, prosperous, sunny Madrid, the war
seems far away, as seen through the convex mirror of time, he writes. “Now
the actors lounge about,/tapas appear and good wine/from la Rioja. Everyone
relaxes,/prepares for what is to come.” Those glimmers of warfare still beckon
from the distorting mirror, however, and they haunted Mares until the end:
“These reminders always here/that Spain and the world/have unfinished
business/in this dance of laughter/and death we do/in these dark times.”