“Places with a bleeding wound”: Fernando Valverde’s internal geographies

Abstract

In 2006 Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) published the volume Poesía (1997-2017), where he collected his complete poetry until that date: Viento favorable (1997-2002), Razones para huir de una ciudad con frío (2004), Los ojos del pelícano (2010) and La insistencia del daño (2014). We analyse here the establishment of a peculiar poetic cartography, which plays a crucial role: it connects territories and cultures through the same existential matrix, shaping an internal geography based on the subjective appropriation of city and nature. This conversion of the “place” into a “practiced space” (Micheal De Certeau) is realized here though two devices: the map and the travel. Valverde initiates his poetry with the metaphor of “walking”: the present appropriation of the natural space, but above all the urban space, is achieved by an authorial voice who selects and builds his itinerary in the confluence of the historic experience, both public and private. Space and subject are, thus, the two coordinates we will deal with, considering them as two sides of the same coin, conceiving them as categories with a cultural and epistemological thickness, which consolidates the ancestral concept of homo viator, within an urban globalized imaginary, closest to something that has already become a phenomenon of our age: “the spatial turn”.