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The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Revised)

A revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical workAnd I who was walkingwith the earth at my waist,saw two snowy eaglesand a naked girl.The one was the otherand the girl was neither. -from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. Christopher Maurer, a leading García Lorca scholar and editor, has substantially revised FSG's earlier edition of the collected poems of this charismatic and complicated figure, who-as Maurer says in his illuminating introduction-"spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death."

Series: FSG Classics

Paperback: 1056 pages

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Revised edition (August 1, 2002)

Language: Spanish

ISBN-10: 0374526915

ISBN-13: 978-0374526917

Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.8 x 9.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #62,046 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #8 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > European > Spanish #40 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > European > Spanish & Portuguese #64 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Emigration & Immigration

I had hoped to delay a review of this compendious volume until I could have managed to distil a summary of Lorca's poetic vision. But I can't. The sheer amount of work he crammed into the fifteen years from 1921 to 1936 is simply astounding, as is his stylistic range. There is, for example, the almost musical brevity of the early SUITES (Lorca was an accomplished pianist), some of which, in their surreal imagery, are as taut as a haiku:The airpregnant with rainbowsshatters its mirrorsover the grove.There are the longer forms of the GYPSY BALLADS (1924-27), with their air of popular storytelling, a narrative of loss that leaves many of its questions unresolved. There are the sprawling Whitmanesque poems he wrote from America in 1930-31, later published as POET IN NEW YORK. And there is his return to simplicity in his final years with THE TAMARIT DIVAN, pain (and sometimes joy) contained in almost classical form:Every afternoon in Granadaa child dies, every afternoon.Every afternoon the water sits downto talk things over with its friends. [...]Fortunately, this volume has a 64-page introduction by Christopher Maurer that quite superbly places Lorca in his geographical, social, and stylistic context. Born in Andalusia, he challenged the hegemony of Madrid, fighting for a style closer to the heart of his people. Born of a bourgeois family, he nonetheless felt a lasting concern for the poor, and was ultimately shot as a leftist by Franco's troops. The friend of Buñuel and Dali, he was a surrealist of words, but with the natural invention of a child, and always in touch with the pulse of his country:[...

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