Gustavo Adolfo Becquer was one of Spain's most important poets of the 19th century, and the instigator of a new Spanish version of Romanticism, influenced by German models such as Heine. Born in Seville in 1836, the son of an artist of Flemish origin, he lived only 34 years, but in that time created a hugely influential body of verse (his Rimas, or Rhymes) as well as several short fictions (the Leyendas, or Legends). His other works include a remarkable series of letters, or epistolary fictions, published as Desde mi celda (From My Cell). Orphaned at the age of five, Becquer was raised by an...

The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodriguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (also responsible for the Shearsman editions of Becquer, Vallejo and Rosalia de Castro) and Luis Ingelmo (who worked on the Becquer edition with Michael Smith), this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, yet major literary figure. Perhaps the most important poet of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodriguez's work deserves to be much better-known in the anglophone world."

The first collection in English by Juan Antonio Villacanas (1922-2001), a major figure in post-war Spanish poetry."

Veronica Volkow is one of Mexico's most significant poets in the post-Paz period. The centrepiece of the book is her astonishing sequence 'Arcana', with one poem for each card in the Tarot pack. Other long poems are featured, together with some shorter lyrics, to give an overview of this remarkable poet's oeuvre. Bilingual edition."

More than 250 quatrains of love and loss, the texts to those inimitable flamenco performances - these are the songs that are wailed by those keening male voices, as the red-and-black-clad women dancers stamp, pirouette and fire castanet rhythms at machine-gun pace. Not high art certainly, but a part of deeper fabric of the real Spain, and a powerful influence on poets such Lorca.

Anibal Nunez (1944-1987) has been described as the best Spanish poet of his generation, sometimes called the generation of '68. His recognition has been a long time coming, no doubt due to the fact that he stood outside the accepted currents of his time. Poet, painter, essayist and translator, he died young, but left behind a very large body of work which has only begun to receive its due in recent years, as the critical orthodoxy in Spain has begun to accommodate his singular vision."

Perhaps the greatest of Spain's Renaissance poets, Fernando de Herrera (1534-97), a native of Seville, was the writer who took on board the experiments with Italian forms carried out by his predecessors Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega (whose work he edited and annotated), and made of them a native style. As it was with many other poets elsewhere-such as Sir Thomas Wyatt in England-the example of Petrarch, both directly, and as mediated by Garcilaso, was crucial in the development of Herrera's elegant vernacular verse in Spanish. With Garcilaso, Boscan and Herrera, Spanish poetry takes...