A family home reduced to rubble to open a hole on the expansion of an airport, and the dream destroyed the working classes. That is the starting point of Tempo fossil (2018), the book of poems that has made this Thursday to the poet Pilar Pallarés, 62 years of age, in the third author in the galician language in receiving the National Prize of Poetry after Manuel Álvarez-lathe operator (2013) and Gonzalo Hermo (2015). The jury appointed by the Ministry of Culture has distinguished this work “to convey with deep wisdom and emotion, a long time lucid and ragged, the experience of the loss and the destruction of what has been lived”.
“That was the main reason, the trigger, but it is only the constructive material”, explains Pallarés after learning of the award on the episode of his life that he was born Tempo fossil. The reflection that host their verses on the loss and the destruction extends also to the natural disaster afflicting the planet and the drama of the refugees.
In that house to be demolished in 2011 along with 70 other houses in Culleredo, the municipality bordering la Coruña where was born the poet, conjuraron many feelings “ambivalent”. He moved there nine years and for their parents the new home was a dream come true, “the working classes that no one takes into account. For her, however, it meant good-bye to his childhood and the “knowledge ” of loneliness”. Tempo fossil emerges out of this tangle of emotions and “the possibility that the loss of something left”, an obsession that is very present in all the work of Pallares.
he Began to write verses at the age of 17. Degree in Galician Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, until 2006, he worked as a professor of galician literature at an institute of A Coruña, leaving a deep impression on many of his students. She is declared a “lover of young people” because they are “people who have enough chaos and indetermination to be open to new things”. Regrets that the poetry is “very present” in the classroom “prejudice” of thinking that “not interested in kids”. “However, they are most teens that are launched to write poetry that is narrative, but then don’t follow,” he stresses. The poetry of precision, “the calm and the time” that the current education system “does not”: “Now thought only of preparing kids for the work and the poetry, from this point of view, it is not cost-effective”.
Pallarés published his first book in 1979, Between lusco e fusco. In 1983 came his next work, Seventh soidade, with which he won the Award Esquío. Subsequently he has written Livro das devoracións (1996), Poems (2000), Leopard are (2011), for which he received the prize of the Association of Writers in Lingua Galega (AELG), and Tempo fossil (2018), of the editorial Chan of Gunpowder.
