“The deeper our inner perception, the greater our understanding of traditional symbols,” wrote the poet Kathleen Raine. She was not speaking from nostalgia, but from an essential conviction: the symbol is the soul's own language. In a time where the word “flower” runs the risk of sounding like an empty ornament or sentimental hashtag, the anthology They Will Put Flowers in Your Stomach, published by Ediciones La Palma in 2024, recovers its symbolic power to say what cannot be said: the ephemeral that endures, the beauty that hurts, the fragile that contains a transcendent truth.
Poetry, as Raine recalled in her essay The Usefulness of Beauty (Vaso Roto, 2015), is not born from a merely aesthetic need, but from the impulse to restore the language of the soul, a language made of images, archetypes and symbols. In this vision, coinciding with the Aristotelian notion of mimesis, art does not imitate the visible but reveals the invisible, the universal through the particular.
Among the many symbols that poetic imagination has cultivated, the flower occupies a privileged and ambivalent place. It is located on the threshold between body and soul, between what withers and what remains. Emblem of beauty, sensuality, transience, but also of death, transformation and sacredness, the flower has been, from biblical hymns to the verses of Milton or Shelley, passing through the dramas of Shakespeare, a spiritual vehicle. Its paradox consists of being, at the same time, the most personal and the most archetypal: something that we have all felt, and that nevertheless belongs to the collective unconscious.
This sensitivity is not exclusive to the Western tradition. In the Wen Fu, the Chinese poet Lu Ji stated that the writer “moves through the six states of being and captures the spirit of the four seasons.” In that cyclical and spiritual vision, the flower also represents the instant in which the eternal manifests itself in the ephemeral, where the invisible takes shape. That same intuition runs through the poems, stories and compositions included in the anthology.
It is in this symbolic context that They Will Put Flowers in Your Stomach is inscribed, a choral anthology born from the Fleje meeting, held in Fuencaliente in 2022. This book not only brings together young Canary Island authors; it also becomes a gesture of transmission and
generational encounter. Around the anthology and the memory of the meeting on the island of La Palma, an event was held at the CIC El Almacén in Arrecife this Tuesday, May 13, where the writer and editor Elsa López —an essential figure in contemporary Spanish poetry— and the researcher Paula Fernández shared the gestation process of the work together with two of the participating authors: Antonio Martín Piñero and the person who writes these lines. As if that were not enough, the announcement of the event was a beautiful collage by the painter and professor Rosa Vera.
The choice of the title of the anthology (an extraordinary verse by Alba Tavío) condenses a visceral and deeply poetic image: the flower as an offering and a wound, as something that embellishes and hurts. Here, the floral symbol does not act as a simple ornament, but as an expressive nucleus that connects the intimate with the collective, the ephemeral with the eternal, the corporeal with the spiritual.
Elsa López, in addition to being an enthusiastic editor of the volume, acted in this case as a generational mediator. Her lyrical gaze, deeply rooted in the earth and the symbolic, marks the aesthetics and emotional tone of the book. With decades dedicated to writing and defending the Canary Island literary heritage, together with Paula Fernández she has woven here a constellation of poetics that dialogue with each other and with tradition.
It is a privilege to have the opportunity to participate in an anthology together with admired and beloved colleagues such as Andrea Abreu, Nayra Bajo de Vera, Manuel Conejo, Marcos Dosantos, Covadonga García Fierro, Óscar Liam Torres, Celia Lorenzo, Echedey Medina, Beatriz Morales, Sandra Padrón, Dimas Prychyslyy, Alba Tavío, María Valerón and, of course, with Antonio Martín Piñero, with whom I had the fortune to collaborate in the organization of the Voces del Extremo Festival in La Laguna last year and whose poetry is characterized by an expressive restraint and a symbolic depth that balances introspection and critical awareness. Together, all these voices make up a diverse literary map that addresses desire, loss, identity, memory and territory, making the personal a space for collective resonance.
But They Will Put Flowers in Your Stomach is not just an anthology: it is also a community gesture, a space for listening and collaboration. Bringing together so many different voices allows us to offer a more real and broad image of current literature in the Canary Islands, and demonstrates that the future of poetry and narrative is built with generosity, in community. Because when the word is shared, something flourishes that goes beyond the personal. That transcends.
