Publisher's Synopsis
One of Spain's great twentieth-century poets, who spent his life in the pursuit of "the hard prize of a few bare words", Salvador Espriu viewed his nine major books of poetry as a single meditation on the tragedy of war. In his spare, rarely rhymed verse, the simplest words are burnished to an elemental power: the words of landscape, the elements, death itself.;Unlike so many poets of his generation, Espriu did not seek exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War. However, choosing to remain in Spain, and by writing in a forbidden tongue - Catalan was outlawed under Franco - Espriu became an exile in his own home. The astonishing strength and beauty of his poetry derives from his unswerving sense of mission: to bear witness to his time, and to "hold the ground" for Catalan, the language he called "mysterious gold".
