'Nostalgia' as the poet’s commitment in Abelardo Linares’s 'Espejos' (1986-1991)

Abstract

Abelardo Linares (1952) is the founder of the publishing house Renacimiento in 1977, which began three years earlier as an old bookshop established in the Santa Cruz district of Seville, enriched by the purchase of a million books from the collection of the New York bookseller Eliseo Torres. In addition to all this, his poetic work, the subject of this work, although it has not been his priority, is collected in four volumes with an anthological purpose that give an account of the prolixity of his verses: Mitos: Poesía reunida in 1979, Sombras in 1986, Espejos in 1991 and Y ningún otro cielo in 2010. The penultimate one from 1991, which is analysed today, won the Critics' Prize. In this paper we will study the poetry of Espejos and try to propose the component of nostalgia as fundamental for the transfer of commitment in the poetry of Abelardo Linares. We will try to conclude that it is precisely the nostalgic component that helps to transfer the commitment in Linares' poetry and how this is then constituted as one more sign of divergence, among the many that have already become evident in recent decades, with respect to the main lines of the so-called Generation of the 70s. With this analysis we are also recovering the work of a poet who has been partially removed from the canon of the generations in an attempt to renew interest in his poetry and to help its gradual inclusion in the discourse on the history of literature at the end of the last century.