IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR, novelty

The poems IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR (EDICIONS AÏLLADES, 2025), TONI ROCA, makes up the volume 19 Collection Ones de poesia and is presented as an exercise in emotional and cultural memory, where poetry becomes an intimate archive of experiences, Mediterranean music and landscapes.

From the prologue, that evokes the famous song popularized by Frank Sinatra, the author establishes a dialogue between musical tradition and personal experience, that places the reader in a hybrid territory between the lyric and the sentimental chronicle.

The work is articulated in short poems, many of them dedicated to friends, cultural places or figures, which gives the whole an air of a memorial mosaic. Roca constantly resorts to musical references —Nat King Cole, Luigi Tenco, The Platters, Françoise Hardy—and cinematographic —Douglas Sirk, Ingrid Bergman, Gloria Grahame—to build an emotional landscape that transcends the individual and becomes a generational testimony. Intertextuality is, por tanto, one of the most notable features: Each poem functions as a bridge between intimate experience and the collective imagination of the second half of the 20th century..

The style is characterized by an apparent simplicity, with short verses and a conversational tone that, Nevertheless, They hide a great symbolic density. The recurrence of images linked to summer, youth and music reinforce the idea of ​​a lost time that is recovered through the poetic word. Nostalgia, far from being a mere melancholic resource, becomes a creative engine: the poet does not limit himself to remembering, but rewrites the memory to give it new life.

Formally, The collection of poems oscillates between poetic prose and free verse, with moments of great lyricism ("The heart is a lonely sex") and others with an almost diaristic tone. This variation provides dynamism, although sometimes it can generate a certain thematic dispersion. Nevertheless, This fragmentation seems to respond to a conscious intention: reflect the fragmentary nature of memory and the impossibility of reconstructing it in a linear way.

en Editorial TV Toni Roca talks to us, from your home, from the book.

As usual in the Ones Poetry Collection, a song by the duo Mon&Marcel based on one of the poems is included in the collection of poems. in this case, Stands for “You don't have to fear”.

definitely, IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR It is a tribute to memory, to the affections and popular culture that marked an era. Toni Roca makes the personal become universal, inviting the reader to recognize themselves in those music, movies and summers that, as he himself states, they were "a mess of good years".

The book is available at the publisher's virtual bookstore.

 

By Medea O. Nodine

 

IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR

Author: TONI ROCA

19 Collection Ones de poesia

EDICIONS AÏLLADES