Lucy Mercer Interviews Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Los Angeles Review of Books has Lucy Mercer interviewing "a poet of 'visionary disposition,'" Spain-based Toby Martinez de las Rivas, whose second collection, Black Sun, is forthcoming in 2018 from Faber and Faber. "In part, it’s a book that attempts to come to terms with the intense fear of disintegration that drove [first book] Terror — the fear of nothingness," says Martinez de las Rivas. More from this conversation:

...There are many poems about the dead or dying, so the idea of the body that suffers is important, as well as the body that might be consoled through care, through physical love — ultimately, through divine love. Other poems are concerned with the larger body of the state, and the importance to me of the coherence of that body, so readers might detect positions that are, perhaps, monarchist, Unionist, and Anglican. In a couple of the poems, I came to see the physical body as the incarnation of time itself. That was a powerful idea to me, and the only response I could conjure to the notion of disintegration inherent in that image was the idea of the physical resurrection, and once I saw it, it was hard to turn away from, as nothing else was equal to it in the shape or totality of its consolation. So I guess one could say that I backed myself into a corner, and had to run with it, finally, as none of the other options were very palatable.

This visceral notion of a physical resurrection, one that you cannot look away from, entrances me. It seems part of a vital — sometimes terrible — allure that runs through Black Sun, enfolding things from the natural world in a rich, alluvial language: multitudes of birds in flight or “egrets with thin legs trailing like anchor ropes,” germinating flowers, moving bodies, landscapes. The book feels close to medieval dream poetry, as does perhaps the speaker’s desire for a shared idyll, a kind of commons — an “England.” Is Black Sun a dreamwork? Have your dreams influenced your poetry?

Well, I could certainly say it began with a dream, or a kind of dream, and that was the black sun itself, a motif that crops up several times in the book, both visually and symbolically or allegorically...

Read on at LARB.