March blew in pretty wild and wet, but I have been on a roll with reading works by Gibraltarian writers and kept up the momentum with Gibraltar, a new collection of poems by Gabriel Moreno. I picked up my copy in person at his launch gig in El Kasbah in Gibraltar at the end of February, a vastly enjoyable night where we were treated to his poetry and music, and a special appearance was made by Morag Butler, all the way from the folklore scene in Kent. An absolute treat.
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| Morag Butler at El Kasbah, February 2026 |
I read Gibraltar quickly, in one afternoon. Then I took it on my travels to UK and read it in a more leisurely way, indulging in the lines of poetry, reading the poems out loud in the three languages used and probing at the layers of meaning. These poems resonate. Perhaps it's because I'm a llanita, no se, but I think it's because good poetry is resonant anyway.
Of course, before I read the poems, I'd heard many of them, read out loud both by Gabriel Moreno and by his translator and publisher, founder of Goat Star Publishing, Rafael Peñas Cruz. This is how poetry is at its most vibrant: read aloud in the voice of the author, with the accents, and intonations and emphases all in the right places, where they are meant to be. It is the llanito accent, the traces of andalusian, that I think bring these poems fully alive, that give them an authenticity that lingers with you long after the moment has moved on. The English language poems are strong, with powerful, lasting images, and the same can be said of the Spanish. In fact, I think I need to also point out that the translations into Spanish are worthy poems in themselves and nothing is lost in translation here. I particularly liked the tenth poem in the first section of the book, the reflections of Gibraltar:
"I favoured ones where you waltzed,
where the smell of bay leaves mixed
with English ale and Moroccan spices
wreathed the crest of our thinking."
"Preferí aquellos donde bailabas un vals,
donde el aroma a laurel se mezclaba
con cerveza inglesa y especies maroquíes
coronando las crestas de nuestro pensamiento."
My favourite were the Llanito sonnets. What began as a response to a challenge that llanito cannot be moulded into a formal poetic structure born of another language, has resulted in sonnets that have torn up the rule book of colonial control. English is the language that was foisted on our ancestors and which we had no real choice but to learn to speak, but we have developed from this and from the many tongues that our people have spoken in our past and grown our own language, on our own soil. They joy of these sonnets is not only in the games that the poet has played with language, but with the shaping of a Gibraltarian meaning, using Gibraltarian language from an English formal poetic structure. There is a beautiful rebellion in this that brought me utter joy.
And then, of course, there was the language of the sonnets, the contemplation of uniquely Gibraltarian themes and landscapes, like the smuggling of Marlboro Man, the walking through the border in La Frontera, the relationships of a youth spent in the Gibraltarian beaches and bars as in The Inheritance, and Fling del Verano.
I imagine a particular challenge must have been how to write a language that has no standard written form. I stumbled over the word "vrada" until I said it out loud several times and the penny dropped. If this is the case, then Moreno's talent burgeons further, demonstrating a mastery of form and language that I think is probably born of his ear for music and how words sound together. The Llanito Sonnets in this selection work well and fall so easily from the lips that the talent and effort they took to write could easily be underestimated. I would ask the reader not to fall into that trap: what is easiest to read is often the hardest to write.
The book moves on to a selection of new poetry, pondering broader themes, such as relationships, humanity itself, and of course, poetry. Moreno is expressing his thinking processes, some of them complex, in his poems and this offers up to readers the chance to plunge into our own thinking. This is what poetry does best, I think, have us explore our own thinking. Or, as he says in Epistola ad Pistones:
"It's all butterflies
innit? Every song
is a chance
for the dreamer
in the cave
to imagine
a more benevolent
field."
This is not the place for an in-depth analysis of this collection of poems, nor am I one skilled enough to do justice to them anyway, but I do sense the literary import of this work and the valuable contribution it makes to Gibraltarian literature, or, as Rafael Peñas Cruz puts it in his prologue:
"But a culture is nothing without poets, for it is only they who ultimately give shape to that immaterial set of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and ways of life peculiar to a certain group of people in a certain space at a certain point in time."
If you haven't got a copy, click the link below and order one now. En serio, este libro hay que leerlo.
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| Gabriel Moreno, troubadour, at El Kasbah, February 2026 |
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