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Summary: Reviews of A Season in Granada
Review: Elizabeth Lowry in TLS (August 7, 1998)[A] thoughtfully arranged and beautifully produced volume.... Although the quantity and strength of the material is impressive --the book contains sixteen previously uncollected items, including two long poem-sequences and two substantial essays, one of which, "Granada: Paradise Closed to Many", is now published in English for the first time-- its subject-matter alone would make it an indispensable companion to the rest of Lorca's writing. For this is Lorca's celebration of Granada, the city to which his family moved when he was eleven and to which he remained emotionally and culturally indebted for the rest of his life.... John Burnside in Poetry Review (Summer 1998) Few poets have such highly-developed senses as Lorca (who was also a musician and an artist); few trust so deeply in the senses of the reader. This, indeed, is one of the great pleasures of reading Lorca's poetry: this sense of privilege, of being included in a rich, subtle and slightly dangerous sensual world. Again, Maurer succeeds admirably, in the selections made here, in conveying Lorca's world view.... I can think of no better celebration of the centenary of this great poet's birth than A Season in Granada; buy it, read it, and encounter, not only a great poet, but the mysterious beauty of a great city.
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Summary: Like a vacation to Granada
Review: I have not been to Granada, but I have felt the colors, and there are colors everywhere! "The wind was red", "What grey moon at nine o'clock drained your cheek of blood", "The ear of corn, is holding its hard, yellow, laugher". This book is a visit to a historic city "with all the elegance and light sent by the Sierra " Nevada. There is a feeling of flowing water with many water allegories, not just from the River Darro but even include the Allhambra Palace (the fortress from 1239) has its own flow ("to be alone with the breeze that comes from old hills of the Allhambra"). The smells are delicious, with "a breeze of sweet basil" and a "bonfire of saffron". What a great thing it must have been to receive his letters! "A few days ago, a green-purple moon, appeared in the bluish mist of the Sierra Nevada, and just across the street a woman was singing a cradle song that tangled itself into the landscape like a golden stream". They really reveal who he is, "I imagine myself to be an immense violet-colored dragonfly over the backwaters of emotion". Even if that Granada of the 1930's no longer exists, or, if even then, existed only in Lorca's mind, I feel privileged to have experienced it.
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Summary: TALES OF THE WIND
Review: Poetry of course is about the compression and distillation of language and no one - no one - reaps more from the process of super-refinement than Lorca. His life, too, was a wonderful comet-like blaze of places and senses and he saw the world through uniquely surreal eyes. What a triumph, then, this book! Granada, and all its allusions to the bounteous earth, to sunlight and music and the idyll of transient shadows and reckless, testosteronal Andalusian love! How to begin to describe Lorca to the uninitiated? Take a song lyric, or a recollected verse of any conventional (or anarchic) metre, from Wordsworth to Whitman - and imagine the diametrical opposite. Imagine a poem of fifty words called Little Tales of the Wind. Imagine the wind! Lorca sighs. Interpretive words fail. His language has the precision of a Toledo blade, but his visions match Blake. This is a wonderful gift to humanity, beautifully published with a cover illustrated by Lorca - or Puck. Deep graitude to Christopher Maurer and his muses for this gentle translation and selection. Pent-up wind, indeed.
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