In these intimate pages, award-winning Catalan poet Joan Margarit offers a passionate defense of poetry and of the intelligible poem—the well-made text that can provide refuge, wisdom, and consolation. Inspired by Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet, this slender volume explores poetry as vocation, obsession, and partnership between writer and reader, a "road toward inner growth." For Margarit, poetry promises "a clarity that allows us mysteriously to live without the need to forget." This is essential reading for poets young and old, writers, and readers seeking insights into the creative process and "the way both poet and reader can find their own way to face solitude."

Joan Margarit received the well-deserved, prestigious Premio Cervantes 2019 Award, the most important prize in Spanish literature, for his body of work. Learn more.