Mario Martín Gijón

"The poetry of Mario Martín Gijón is characterised by a morphological promiscuity which springs from an intense awareness of the susceptibility of language to experiment. Words become lexical clay in the hands of the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand. They are like scattered pieces of a mosaic reassembled to form a new puzzle. This is done by the insertion of brackets around letters, slashes allowing a choice between letters, dashes severing or connecting syllables, suffixes or prefixes belonging equally to the words surrounding them. It multiplies the ways in which a phrase can be read, multiplies its potential simultaneous meanings." —Eduardo Moga "Mario Martín Gijón's (Dis)illusion shows us language as a web of interlinked meanings. Opposites lurk within each word like sprung traps; allusions haunt them; one must proceed with immense delicacy. With the virtuosity of a lacemaker, Martín Gijón brackets and pleats his syllables and the meanings they carry in this extended, fractured reflection on living as loss." —Fiona Sampson "Martín Gijón deliberately creates ambiguity and multiple possible meanings — harking back to the Cubists' ambition to paint the same object from different perspectives within the same picture - (...) Thus, the poet is not only navigating loss but also, in a phenomenological approach, examining the way his own consciousness is fractured into different possible responses to a situation where his sense of being a self has been shattered." —Ian Seed

Mario Martin Gijon's (Sur)rendering is a sequence of short pas-sionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness. Eduardo Moga explains his method: 'The poetry of Mario Martin Gijon is characterised by a morphological promiscuity which springs from an intense awareness of the susceptibility of language to experiment. Words become lexical clay in the hands of the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand. They are like scattered pieces of a mosaic reassembled to form a new puzzle. This is done by the insertion of brackets around letters, slashes allowing a choice between letters, dashes severing or connecting syllables, suffixes or prefixes belonging equally to the words surrounding them. It multiplies the ways in which a phrase can be read, multiplies its potential simultaneous meanings." So the poet is able to juggle the memory of pleasure with present suffering, joy and pain in a single verse: (pre/es/ab)sence. Ambiguity striving for synchronicity, the language of love becoming as fraught with contradiction as love itself.