Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Suites (Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics)

This volume offers a fresh translation of a generous selection of Lorca’s suites, a body of work that Federico Garcia Lorca left largely unpublished upon his death in 1936. Composed between 1920 to 1923, these poems are closest in spirit and technique to Lorca’s Songs (1927) and his Poem of the Deep Song (1931). In 1926 the poet suggested they could be released together to form a ‘boxed set’, yet this plan, like other earlier efforts, fell through. Lorca’s suites reveal a poet who is interested in creating a modern style founded on popular oral lyric and fragmented narrative. But they also show a poet who explores his heart and his sexual orientation, and who may have hesitated too long about publication. Lorca achieved the fullest expression of a personal yearning in his long poem In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits. Out of an impossible contradiction between self-discovery and wariness of disclosure rises the blue world of the ideal–a timeless world that all readers of Lorca will want to take into account, inasmuch as it forms a counterpoint to the rest of his work.