First published in 1968, when the author was seventy, Poems of Consummation is Vicente Aleixandre's intimate, philosophic, densely compressed lyric engagement with old age and the mystery of death. The poems are intense, mostly brief, elemental in their imagery (stone, ocean, wind, fire), and they address, in sometimes gnomic terms, the unknowable--mainly the paradoxes of memory: the simultaneous absence and presence of remembered love and the lover no longer living. The voice in these poems anticipates its own posthumousness, and speaks at times as if (and now in fact) from beyond the grave

A comprehensive collection spans the entirety of Nobel Laureate Aleixandre's career, from his early surrealist work to his complex and fascinating "dialogues," as well as prose interludes.

Begun in 1939, barely four months after the close of the Spanish Civil War, these poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Vicente Aleixandre were written during a period of hardship and despair. In spite of his surroundings Aleixandre created the splendor of the shadow of a lost paradise that consisted of memory, nostalgia, yearning and illusion. This is the first full English version. The original Spanish text is included.

These include surrealism and the seminal role of Freud, narrative structure, genre, and lyric ancestors such as Fray Luis de Leon, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, and Ruben Dario."--BOOK JACKET.

A comprehensive introduction to Surrealism in Spain, with focus on poetry, art, drama and film.

Few modern poets, in any language, give us this chilling sense of knowing ourselves to be before a man who really speaks, effectively possessed by the fatality and the lucidity of passion. If it were possible to define in a phrase the place Cernuda occupies in modern Spanish-language poetry, I would say he is the poet who speaks not for all, but for each one of us who makes up the all. And he wounds us in the core of that part of each of us "which is not called glory, fortune, or ambition" but the truth of ourselves. --Octavio Paz.