A revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work And I who was walkingwith the earth at my waist, saw two snowy eaglesand a naked girl.The one was the otherand the girl was neither. -from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"Federico Garcia Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers. Christopher Maurer, a leading Garcia Lorca scholar and editor, has substantially revised FSG's earlier edition of the collected poems of this charismatic and complicated figure, who-as Maurer says in his illuminating introduction-"spoke unforgettably of all that most interests us: the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood, and death.""

Author Biography

Federico Garcia Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a few miles outside Granada in the province of Andalusia, southern Spain. From an early age he was fascinated by Spain's mixed heritage, adapting its ancient folk songs, ballads, lullabies, and flamenco music into poems and plays. By the age of thirty, he had published five books of poems, culminating in 1928 with" Gypsy Ballads, " which brought him far-reaching fame. In 1929-30 he studied in New York City, where he wrote the poems among his most socially engaging and compelling that were to be published posthumously (and famously) as "Poet in New York." Upon returning to Spain he devoted much of his attention to theater, "the poetry which rises from the page . . . and becomes human." In 1936, at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot to death by anti-Republican rebels in Franco's army, and his books were banned and destroyed.Christopher Maurer, the editor of Garcia Lorca's "Selected Verse, Poet in New York, " and other works, is the author of numerous books and articles on Spanish poetry. He is head of the Department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Illinois in Chicago."