Juan Antonio Villacañas

“Bilingual edition of Juan Antonio Villacañas' Selected Poems”

“Personal web page”

“Whether Villacañas wrote in liras, free verse or whatever form, his poetry constantly springs from a profound search for transcendence and a concern from humanity that can make him to be at once social and spiritual. The vigour of his verses gives them quite often a muscular quality which appears equally in his most earthy poems of indictment or solidarity and in those in which he looks for God, suffers His silence or talks to Him.”

“Thoughtis a flower from other worlds, a talethat is torn in each written word.……………I go outdoorsto give restto the soul’s tired muscles.”

“If pain does not diewe shall make it poetry.”

“I come to make song, after the tears.And even if a choir of mensprayed my tongue with silence,poetry will come, with liberating voice,to make my song fall from the treesand reach the most deeply buried abysses of those tearsthat the child lent me when crying himself into life.Because my infant songis stronger than man’s tears,and it could even conquer merobbing the need of tears from the sun and the wind.”

“I have an immensity which shivers in the oceans,being, as I am, only a little fountain, small as an eye.”

“God borders my incredulityconstantly.And my incredulity is so much God, that I am almost sureto adore Him.”

“Death is a life of questionsthat are being buried,and one ends alwayswith doubt tangled in the lips.”

“The earth is brief,as brief as a man’s solemnity.………When you, Earth, stop palpitating in my fleshI, flesh, will give you all my earth.”