He brings to the ordinary--to time, to landscape and stony earth, to bean fields and cities, to events and dreams--magical sound that conveys order, penetrating sight and attention. "The poems written while we are awake...are more original and more beautiful, and sometimes more wild than those made from dreams," Machado said.In the newspapers before and during the Spanish Civil War, he wrote of political and moral issues, and, in 1939, fled from Franco's army into the Pyrenees, dying in exile a month later. When in 1966 a bronze bust of Machado was to be unveiled in a town here he had taught school, thousands of people came in pilgrimage only to find the Civil Guard with clubs and submachine guns blocking their way.This selection of Machado's poetry, beautifully translated by Bly, begins with the Spanish master's first book, Times Alone, Passageways in the House, and Other Poems (1903), and follows his work to the poems published after his death: Poems from the Civil War (written during 1936 - 1939).

    Federico Garcia Lorca was the victim of the passions that arose in Spain as the Church, the military and the bourgeoisie embarked on their reckless and brutal repression of "undesirables". For Lorca was not a political man; he embraced Spain - from its struggling leftist movement to its most conservative traditions - with a love that transcended politics. His "crime" was his antipathy to pomposity, conformity and intolerance. For years the Spanish government suppressed the truth about Lorca's death. In this recreation of the assassination, Ian Gibson redresses the wrong. Based on information only recently made available, this is an illumination not only of the death of a great poet, but of the atmosphere of Civil War Spain that allowed it to happen.

    Composed by Jimenez between the years 1917 to 1920, the works in this grouping vanished mysteriously, only to be rediscovered a half-century later among the author's private papers. Published in Spain for the first time in 1983, they appear now at last in a bilingual edition, the English lovingly rendered by the scholar and poet Antonio T. de Nicolas, and introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson. This is a book of verse for the poet in all of us -- it sings of the invisible realities which we carry in our hearts and which carry us through a life filled with symbols, toil and beauty.