A Season in Granada: Uncollected Poems and Prose
For the centenary of Garcia Lorca's birth, Maurer (Spanish, Vanderbilt Univ.) has translated these 20 newly discovered poems and an essay, "Granada: Paradise Closed to Many." They celebrate the ineffable beauty of Granada, "fit for dream and daydream," to which the poet attributed half of any glory that should accrue to him for his work. Hemmed in by the Sierra Morena and deprived of an outlet to the sea, Granada bred in its people a natural lyricism that fell back upon the rooftops until Lorca thought to promote the finely concentrated lyrics as an antidote to the overluxuriance of Romantic poetry. Granada's Alhambra he conceives as the "water's pantheon," and he sees his role as an allegorist of water, as if he were impregnated by the Guadalquivir River itself. He even decries the commercialism of the city's Holy Week, already "devoid of the seriousness and poetry" of the celebration he knew as a child. Any drift toward sentimentality is spiked by the originality of the images. For all poetry collections.?Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, CumberlandCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.