Imprisoned in Franco's jails, Miguel Hernandez died from untreated TB in 1942 at the age of 31. His passionate and bittersweet work is a dazzling reminder that force can never defeat spirit. Bilingual edition with testaments by Lorca, Neruda and other leading poets, and a comprehensive illustrated introduction by Willis Barnstone.

THE PRISON POEMS is the first complete translation into English of Miguel Hernandez's Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, a classic of 20th century Spanish poetry, comparable in many respects to the work of Lorca and Pablo Neruda. The poems in this book were mostly written while he was in prison after the defeat of Republican Spain. Although he was totally involved in the Republican cause, its defeat did not lead to bitterness on his part. The poems are profoundly human, rising beyond political ideology constantly striving toward a redemptive vision of the human condition. The translator and...

Miguel Hernandez (1910-1942) is, along with Antonio Machado, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and Federico Garcia Lorca, one of the greatest Spanish poets of the twentieth century. This "Selected Poems" spans the whole of Hernandez's brief writing life, and includes his most celebrated poems, from the early lyrics written in traditional forms, such as the moving elegy Hernandez wrote to his friend and mentor Ramon Sije (one of the most famous elegies ever written in the Spanish language), to the spiritual eroticism of his love poems, and the heart-wrenching, luminous lines written in the trenches of war....