The Road Of Being

The Road of Being, Germain Droogenbroodt’ s latest poetry book, represents a new inflection in his already long career, with sixteen poetry collections published, several of them published in thirty countries. Although in the three parts that make up the set we will find diverse thematic approaches and interests, they all converge in that backbone that constitutes a concise and suggestive style that makes Germain Droogenbroodt’ s poetry unmistakable.

The first block with which the book opens, refers to the mostly meditative part of his previous poetry, a vision, with our eyes closed and turned inward, that allows us to see with total lucidity the external reality. The poem then becomes that bridge that reintegrates the inner with the outer, the poet, the human being, with nature.

In Witnesses of a Time, not by chance the central part of the book, we look at the crude reality in which we live: human alienation (entertainment) and control (surveillance by digital devices) in this technocratic world, in which also vanity and hatred so thriving in social networks represent the agony of discursive communication, of argumentation or even of personal thought itself: others (a robot, a chip) end up thinking for us. And with this agony, democracy is wounded and looks into the abyss of totalitarian horizons. Depersonalization, environmental deterioration, anxiety and mental illness . .  lead us to ask ourselves "But is life / that is no longer dignified / still life?”

In Without Return, the third and last part of the collection, we find poems that allude to the passage of time and our futile resistance to stop it, to the ephemeral and the changing, to our vulnerability and the ups and downs of life. The book closes with several poems about the invasion and war in Ukraine: all the horror of extreme violence and destruction in the image of a rope around the neck of the dove of peace, our most human helplessness, our immense fragility.

Rafael Carcelén