Guide for the Perplexed. (Collected Poems, 1978-2023)

David Pujante (Cartagena, 1953). “The serene intensity of all these poems, their cohesion, and their elegant and natural flow will win over the reader.” (Díez de Revenga, La Opinión) “It’s not easy, no, to leave any of these poems and move on to the next.” (Carlos Aganzo, El Norte de Castilla) “Painting, music, and poetry, embodied in concrete figures, underpin a series of poems where discourses on beauty resolve into the melancholy of what remains unattained.” (Túa Blesa, El Cultural de El Mundo) “Pujante is a poet of great caliber.” (Fermín Herrero, ABC/Castilla y León) “[La isla, Pre-Textos, 2002] is one of the most beautiful books of poetry published this year.” (Soren Peñalver, La Opinión) “We are [with Animales despiertos, Renacimiento, 2013] before a mature text that must be acknowledged. A wise poet of what I have called ‘meditative realism poetry,’ and even though the poet feels neither uncomfortable nor out of place on the path of the hidden (Cavafy didn’t publish a single truly great book in his lifetime), the role of the critic-reader is to sound the alarm so that this profound and unvarnished book does not go unnoticed.” (Luis Antonio de Villena, El Norte de Castilla) “El sueño de una sombra [Calambur, 2019] is a beautiful book that, beyond its poetic quality—we are not going to discover now that Professor Pujante is one of the great poets of his generation and, as someone already said, his career contains far more poetry than his name suggests—leaves us with mixed feelings: happiness and melancholy, enthusiasm for life and sorrow for its fleeting nature.” (Alonso Chávarri, Diario La Rioja) “In these 21 winter odes [Milenio, 2023], the verse of the poet from Cartagena is both dense and light, a balance that very few are capable of achieving.” (Juan Carlos Sierra, Paraíso)