I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about the city over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn’t find anything written earlier. The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit...

Mercedes Cebrian is interested in how the ideas and ideals by which we live our lives intersect with the minutiae of those lives: food, decor, travel, taxes, relationships, celebrity-watching, the quiddity of the everyday. I remember a board-game / from my child-hood: trees, houses, cars, / tiny people with fixed smiles, lives mapped-out,/ with consumer choices made for you/ and decisions taken for you / on the little question-cards she writes in the poem 'City now or soon', but the day-to-day of the shiny new Spanish democracy turns out to be not quite so picture-perfect, and in her surreal,...