• Fundación Banco Santander publishes Doce líricas para un nuevo mundo [Twelve lyrics for a new world], the latest book of the Fundamental Works Collection, in which poetry becomes a tool for reflection and a balm to face the concerns of the future.
• The volume continues the saga that began in 2002 with Doce visiones para un nuevo mundo, and once again brings together twelve authors who, through their poetry collections, share their particular vision of the world to come: Antonio Colinas, Antonio Lucas, Aurora Luque, Carlos Pardo, Chantal Maillard, Clara Janés, Fermín Herrero, Jorge Riechmann, Luisa Castro, Raquel Lanseros, Vanesa Pérez-Sauquillo and Vicente Gallego.
  
• The book is accompanied by 24 audios with interviews featuring each poet and spoken excerpts of their work, available through the foundation's website.
  

Madrid, March 15, 2023 - PRESS RELEASE

We live in times of dizzying changes; uncertainty becomes a shadow and an opportunity that accompanies us with each new event. The coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the unprecedented global crisis, technological and climate change... Everything is undoubtedly leading to great confusion, and human beings yearn for clarity.

More than ever, in this crucial moment of personal and social transformations, poetry ought to be a flame that warms and illuminates us with its deepest radiance from the song of life in all its infinitude of shades and forms. Although it was not an easy task, twelve renowned poets have accepted this challenge of horizons and propose through this work, propose many other lyrics that form a unique frieze of glances and approaches to visible and invisible dimensions.

Antonio Colinas, Antonio Lucas, Aurora Luque, Carlos Pardo, Chantal Maillard, Clara Janés, Fermín Herrero, Jorge Riechmann, Luisa Castro, Raquel Lanseros, Vanesa Pérez-Sauquillo and Vicente Gallego compose this flock of nightingales that deliver unpublished songs for a new world. They are joined by the epilogue of the poet, writer, and university professor José María Parreño, who writes a lyrical essay that illuminates the destruction of the link between human beings and Nature.

The volume stands out for the variety that only a melting pot of opinions can offer, since each author has expressed their concerns and their impressions, thoughts and hopes about the current situation of the world and the future that awaits us. No two collections of poems are the same, since no two poets are the same: the reader will find everything from a tribute to Einstein's centenary, which takes place this year, and which asks if the equations are not in themselves a poem, to harsh criticism of the environmental situation, which questions whether the foundations of a world that is already in a state of destruction can be fixed. But there are also optimistic conceptions about the moment in which we live and what is to come, putting aside nostalgia and melancholy for what we have already lost, encouraging us to raise the flag of hope.

After a closer look at the titles, we find that, after a summer in Via Punica, notes for exploration, we find the prophecy of Casandra and her hoarseness not being listened to, the death drive  which captures us, the suffocating calima, quantum poetry that lifts us up through the Milky Way, while the vertical works without scaffolding of the rhapsodes in the collapsing walls continue, and Dheghom – the Earth in the Indo-European language - looks at us more agitated than ever in the midst of the moving  that force heroes like Guido Guzmán to begin to walk  to be devoted to a sacred task  which, ultimately, will lead us back to the same path where the ants walk.

At Fundación Banco Santander we never cease in our commitment to promote culture and thought, aware of the wave of transformations derived from the current context, convinced that the creative freedom of the artist is fundamental in the search for a literature that serves as a refuge for human beings. One year after the publication of Twelve Visions for a New World, we have continued this publishing adventure by offering twelve acclaimed poets free rein in this Twelve Lyric Poems for a New World.

As is customary in the Foundation's publications, the book is accompanied by podcasts with interviews with the authors, as well as excerpts from their poems recited by the authors themselves.

ANNEX: Authors' statements

Antonio Colinas: "It was a challenge and I opted for a long prose poem that offered me greater freedom and allowed me to respond within it to themes that are very much part of our times. We should celebrate this initiative in times when literary creation is usually more "product" than fruit. These twelve lyrics want to walk in the opposite direction, because in addition to emotion in the texts there is thought, commitment without clichés, pure literature, several generations. A book born from the freedom of writing and editing."

Antonio Lucas: "This volume could be a poetic phonendoscope: reading or listening to the collected texts and interviews, it is possible to recognize the systole and diastole of twelve ways of being in poetry, twelve vibrations, each one, with its rhythm, shaping a conception of the world, of the present, of tomorrow and of what poetry anticipates, proposes, reveals or returns."

Aurora Luque: "We do not walk: we let ourselves be dragged along, complacent in our respective aphonies. We have meekly accepted tyranny: we carry with us "a portable Creon, a tailor-made tyrant" who "buries our voice". "Poetry exhorts us to live more," to accept as counsellors the most uncomfortable Cassandras, to dream again the old dream of the just, free, peaceful city."

Carlos Pardo: "During a short car ride in the heat wave (air conditioning on full blast), the two protagonists begin to fall in love. Meanwhile, they analyse their life with irony and tenderness. Thus, this new beginning (their love) forces them to be optimistic (and somewhat idiotic, in the best sense of the term) in a world that seems doomed to pessimism."

Chantal Maillard: “human beings are the only animals that do not learn from their mistakes. They are driven by craving, greed and, unlike their fellow travellers on this planet, a colossal stupidity for what is important. There may be new worlds, but I fear we will always end up messing everything up. We are not to be trusted.”

Clara Janés: " The quest for an optimistic horizon in the reality of life today always leads me to science, and to those who have made it advance with their totalizing vision, such as those impeccable dialogues that were those who gathered around Niels Bohr, and those who presented different horizons such as Albert Einstein".

Fermín Herrero: "My lyric for our new world attempts to interpret it a little, to approach its banal complexity through a fragile, weak allegory."

Jorge Riechmann: “The fidelity of poetry is being able to name things as they are," Félix Grande sometimes said. Hence the deep ethical root of the poem, beyond the "commitment": not to avert the eye from what is to be looked at, not to avert the ear from what is to be listened to, not to avert the word from what is to be named."

Luisa Castro: "Giordano Bruno spoke of the multiverse or infinite worlds in the 16th century. In "Mudanza" those worlds converge at the same time; memory, desires, and this present that tears us apart with its desire for permanence in the midst of the ephemerality of our lives". "Mudanza" is poetry understood as an exercise of vision, meditation, antidote, and escape from an anxious time".

Raquel Lanseros: "human beings continue their journey through history, more than ever aware of the need to conquer their own freedom and return to vital positions that are closer to nature and compatible with long-term life on the planet".

Vanesa Pérez Sauquillo: "in La Sagrada Tarea  I want to open the prism to the new worlds that are born with each new being; with each act of creation and destruction; with each wound, which opens a new way of looking; with each healing. It is a Sacred task of ours, to give back the light we receive."

Vicente Gallego: "as an ancient proverb with which I open my poetry book says, if you found your ant and listened to it, who could steal your treasure".

José María Parreño: “In a world that is moving madly towards an ecological and social crisis, the delirious language of poetry brings us back to sanity. We are not only facing an economic and social crisis, but also a cultural one. A new culture and new words are needed to respond in a different way."