Songs and ballads

The work of Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's greatest modern poet, has long been admired for its emotional intensity and metaphorical brilliance. Few poets take us more directly and memorably to what Lorca described as "the dark root of the scream," the terrain of the duende, where inspiration delivers a new poetic reality and "intelligence" discovers its limitations.

For many years, until the recent publication of FSG's Collected Poems, English readers' view of Lorca has been determined by a few well-known books - The Divan at Tamarit, Poet in New York, The Gypsy Ballads - and by a lamentably small number of poems.

Now this Selected Verse, the most complete paperback anthology available in English, draws on FSG's two-volume Poetical Works, providing authoritative versions by outstanding poets and translators: Francisco Aragon, Catherine Brown, Cola Franzen, Will Kirkland, William Bryant Logan, Jerome Rothenberg, Greg Simon, Alan S. Trueblood, John K. Walsh, and Steven F. White.

In this bilingual edition, Lorca's poetic range comes clearly into view, from the playful Suites and stylized evocations of Andalusia to the utter gravity and mystery of the final elegies, confirming his stature as one of our century's finest poets.