Anna Montero

Anna Montero is from Valencia, both by origin and adoption. Montero's poetry is an inquiry into silence, in which she reveals the impossibility of capturing the instant beyond one's own verbal experience, which is the poem itself. With a minimal use of elements her poetry is maximally suggestive, for in the silence we intuit the presence of lost voices and in absence we comprehend the futility of the fact that what was once present for us now occupies a void.


Anna Montero's poetry never reflects the unbridled wildness of a storm. Her poems are serene acceptance of the voracity of an element that is common to flotsam lying on the beach and the words with which the poet tries to cling to quietude: the inexorable passing of time. I admit that, in this regard, I should have liked to find more moments of expansion, some crack through which the inner convulsion might emerge without all the symbology-stripped containing dykes over which Montero constructs her work, the code that if, on the one hand, it confers her own distinctive voice -in good part characterised by her search for the purifying chisel of silence- on the other, it becomes a gag that only permits the fizzing depths to be intuited. Like the calm of the sea that in a few days will see to it that everything is returned to its place. I speak of inner convulsion because the signs are there, for example -and this is a crucial theme- the passing of time which, throughout Serenitat de cercles leaves its traces behind. These, however, are traces that are fossilised, where contemplation and reflection, have been detained, where the process of erosion that polishes forms has done its work until coming to a tacit recognition of being part of the hours that do not stop.

Going beyond mere appearances or the surface of things is one of the main aims of the book, one of the key matters with which Montero must come to grips in her inner periplus: "to know the close water under the rock. to feel the presence of the sap in the heart of the tree". This means expanding our apprehension of the world from a level of introspection that should lead us to feel kinship with Anna Montero's poetry and her conception of writing and also, perhaps, of life, from the standpoint of oriental teachings more or less close to a Zen perspective. [It is her] intention to recompose the world from an awareness of a dual reality: one that appears to the external senses -a mountain peak, the motionless horizon of the sea- and the other, the underlying one -subterranean rivers, the quiet chafing of shells at the bottom of the ocean.

Appropriating the past is another of the zenithal points where the venture of introspection brings lucidity that goes beyond a murky surface ("day by day / in the mirror there slips away / a root going deeper than time, / a secret of furtive water / that the darkness was hiding"), and this lucidity must come motivated precisely by liberation vis-à-vis temporal conventions, in order to reach the exact centre of the circle, the zero point, the umbilical connection at the end of which a life begins.

Maria Josep Escrivà, "Tot és on ha de ser" (Everything Is Where It Must Be"), Caràcters, (second phase), Nº. 30 (January 2005)

There is, in Anna Montero's poetry, a primary, primitive, essential, tactile, "earthy" (in the positive sense of the word) vitality, that bears some relation with Miquel Gil's way of being and speaking. It is precisely this essence, that we can scent in the lines of the poem "S'amaga" (Is Is Hidden), and that we joyfully pick up in the voice of the singer-songwriter as well. It is an essence that makes its presence felt as a distinctive feature that bestows singularity and poetic "personality" on Anna Montero's literary project: and this is repeated as her "trademark" fable, as a syndrome of beauty in every one of her poems.

[...] Serenitat de cercles is yet another demonstration of the savoir faire, of Anna Montero, who has slowly made a name for herself as one of our poets and one who should be kept very much in mind. Anna Montero's poetry is at once sensual and scathing. This is the premise and power of her poetry. Underlying the abundant flow of her verses, there is an endless current that imbibes of the essence of things, a primordial and telluric force that takes us back to the first word: a horizon of essential words, the vital and precious sap that lies beneath the bark. Continue reading...