A splash of sea foam. A sly sparrow. A man dodging the rain. From such mundane, unexpected moments, Spanish poet Claudio Rodríguez crafted his 1965 Alliance and Condemnation, a collection of poems that temper the joy of existence--the "bounty that turns my flawed breath into prayer"--with a questioning of empirical reality. In these pages are poems of love and hate, contrition and forgiveness, and the joys of sorrow and existence. Many of the poems are essentially parables that seem to address the immediacy of the world yet point beyond it toward philosophical and eternal values. The result is a conjoining of the real and the ideal, a frequent theme in Spanish literature. Many of these poems bridge the distance between the Spanish mystics, among them Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa, and the nature poetry of romanticism. Of all his creations, the radiant poems in Alliance and Condemnation offer the best imaginable introduction to his extraordinary life and work.

"Each of these works is meticulously structured around a two-poem section that gives each its unique configuration and character. Yet, at the same time, each poem maintains its individual independence and singular integrity."--BOOK JACKET. "In Breaking New Ground, W. Michael Mudrovic presents a comprehensive reading and detailed analysis of Rodriguez's work to date, including Casi una leyenda."--BOOK JACKET.

This study reverses the widespread notion that Rodriguez, a major voice in contemporary Spanish poetry, is a naive writer by interpreting his poetry as a sustained meditation on the problem of poetic language.

A leading critic of contemporary Spanish poetry examines here the work of ten important poets who came to maturity in the immediate post-Civil War period and whose major works appeared between 1956 and 1971: Francisco Brines; Eladio Cabañero; Angel Crespo; Gloria Fuertes; Jaime Gil de Biedma; Angel González; Manuel Mantero; Claudio Rodríguez; Carlos Sahagún; and José Angel Valente. Although each of these poets has developed an individual style, their work has certain common characteristics: use of the everyday language and images of contemporary Spain, development of language codes and intertextual references, and, most strikingly, metaphoric transformations and surprising reversals of the reader's expectations. Through such means these poets clearly invite their readers to join them in journeys of poetic discovery. Andrew P. Debicki's is the first detailed stylistic analysis of this generation of poets, and the first to approach their work through the particularly appropriate methods developed in "reader-response" criticism.

En las bases de la convocatoria del Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana se hace constar que el premiado recibe como parte del galardón la “edición de un volumen con una recopilación antológica de poemas del autor premiado, para divulgar su obra y sin finalidad lucrativa, que será publicado por Ediciones Universidad de Sala- manca”. Ese gran encargo, realizado por Patrimonio Nacional y la Universidad de Salamanca, comenzó en 1992 con la edición del libro Cinco visiones de Gonzalo Rojas que prologó la profesora Carmen Ruiz Barrionuevo. Mas con aquel poemario se inició una nueva etapa para Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. En lo propiamente editorial dio origen a una colección, la Biblioteca de América, que año tras año se ha ido enriqueciendo con los títulos de los sucesivos poetas galardonados: Claudio Rodríguez, João Cabral de Melo Neto, José Hierro, Ángel González, Álvaro Mutis, José Ángel Valente, Mario Benedetti, Pere Gimferrer, Nicanor Parra, José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, Sophia de Mello, José Manuel Caballero Bonald, Juan Gelman, Antonio Gamoneda, Blanca Varela, Pablo García Baena, José Emilio Pacheco, Francisco Brines y, en esta vigésima ocasión, con la poeta cubana Fina García Marruz. Todos ellos aportaron un enorme valor a la nómina de autores que engrosan nuestro catálogo y dotaron a la colección de una relevancia literaria y editorial que mereció el reconocimiento, al ser premiada como mejor colección, de la Unión de Editoriales Universitarias Españolas (UNE) en el año 2006.