Michel Galiana's mostly unpublished work consists of:
-two essays, entitled 'Beyond your Homeland' (1987) and 'Treatise on Indifference' (1989) in which he proclaims that he wants no part in the collective extravagances forced on us by State and Society
-two collections of narratives 'A Trip to the West Suburbs' (1991) and 'The Cry' (1993) .
And yet, poetry has always been to him a field of investigation, as well as a form of asceticism.
He wrote among others
- 'The Dream in the Orchard' (1990) where verse appears in a strict shape to assert the poet's rejection of the visible world,
- 'In Memoriam' (1991) , also keeping the strict canons of poetry
- 'Out of a Book of Hours' (1992) , a title borrowed from Rilke, which completes the former one and also gives account of poetical introspection but in a less structured manner.
Dry garden. Stone and thought. And sky and quietness.
Beyond the wall a tree that twists its gnarly trunk.
In me there's no beyond. And all thinks and all weighs.
A point where certainty may reconcile with luck,
...
A coat of screams and yells lines a rug of ember,
Circle surrounding him and mane that at him tears.
When he perceives the pole wrung by his panic fears,
He climbs up to the top and hopes to recover.
...
Your body, mainland that swells and roars over there,
And sends out its doubts, its dreads and its wrinkles,
Filling its mazes of barren chinks and crackles
With tribes whose rumours cause your pallet to shiver.
...
Your love never would have assuaged this hatred
Which cast on me a spell that I could never tame.
Its cry in me soars like, from the torture chamber,
The song that convicts sing to alleviate their pain.
...
No grass. The ground is bare -either stone or gravel-
Strewn with empty bottles, litter, old newspapers.
Trees, deprived of foliage, with no shade but their trunks'.
Hard wooden benches and a few long stone ledges.
...