The poet Joan Margarit says in his book Poètica (published by Empúries) that he owes Jorge Luis Borges "the accuracy of words, which is never an artifice"; to Rosalía de Castro, "how you can move through the darkest, most dreary and saddest areas of the human being with dignity", and to Elizabeth Bishop he owes not having fallen into the temptation of shortcuts. Stuart Thomas's work convinced him "that to talk about something you have to love it and at the same time question it with the same fury" and, also that without tenderness there can be no good poems. About Gabriel Celaya, Margarit says: "He fascinated me by showing me the joy that saved me from the very centre of distress", and the fact is that Margarit is like his poems, surprising for his honest intensity, the inability to self-deceive, the aversion to artifice. His tenderness and frank, torrential laugh surprise us.
Today, Margarit (Sanaüja 1938), the poet who has filled his readers with so many silences, stops to take stock: "It is as if living were to cross a very narrow pass over a cliff, walking in balance: you have to do it quickly and without looking down" and he knows that his passage along the tight rope makes sense with architecture and poetry. The wall, the house, the structure, the intimacy on one side and the poetry on the other, which has been a way to put words to life. To his and to ours. And for that we thank him.
