Cuando el monarca espera

Composed of a single poem divided into autobiographical fragments, "Cuando el monarca espera" opens a comprehensive reflection on the poet's own job in a changing world and bewildered by the speed with which its natural, social and technological cycles alternate. Throughout the book, belonging to the genre of "writings on writing" and articulated by verses of aphoristic character and great plastic expressiveness, the image of the monarch is drawn as a vacillating projection of the destiny of which we are born subjects and against which, sooner or later, we have to rebel. In an attempt to scrutinize his memory and to bear witness to an intimate as well as universal experience, Javier Vela restores a flow of dialogue with other literary traditions -from Giacomo Leopardi to Saint-Pol-Roux, from TS Eliot to Theresa Cha- que it makes the mythical and symbolic potentialities of the poetic word vibrate in order to free it from the limitations that reality imposes on it, reminding the poet of the task of his creative exercise.