The world is a garden collects the reading of poems that Oblivion García Valdés (Santianes de Pravia, Asturias, 1950) carried out in el Círculo de Bellas Artes In the spring of 2009, the writer, winner of the National Poetry Prize in 2007 and possessor of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Spanish poetry, offers a detailed review of her creative journey. The volume is completed with two short critical essays on her work and an interview in which García Valdés reflects on the recurring themes and obsessions in her poetic work.

“Actually, the work of the poem—or the preliminary work that will later give rise to that kind of writing—is done in many layers and in many ways, and the garden is a bit like that. […] I realize that I have titled some of my recent readings ‘The World Is a Garden’ with a somewhat contradictory meaning. That is to say, starting from what exists: misfortune, illness, routine and suffering, poverty, cold, all the negative things we can think of about human life, and even more so in the contemporary world, which is especially harsh and difficult; keeping all that in mind, to say, despite everything: ‘the world is a garden,’ juxtaposing that beauty, and the capacity to generate that image has, with everything else.”
Oblivion García Valdés