The Complete Perfectionist

A Season in Granada brings together poems, essays and excerpts from letters by the great twentieth-century poet Federico Garcia Lorca, including two sequences of poems and an essay previously unpublished in English. The writings form a dazzling, elegiac celebration of the city of Granada, where Lorca grew up, where he studied, and to which he returned frequently in his life and in his imagination. And where he would die. In Christopher Maurer's words, the twenty poems in the two Suites, Poem of the Fair', and Summer Hours', draw on the structural ideas and whimsical tone of one of Lorca's favourite composers, Claude Debussy. The idea was to capture some phenomenon - the moon, the hours of evening, the ocean, wheatfields, flamenco - in a series of stylized estampas (prints) or moments.' They represent an important addition to the Lorca canon. Published to celebrate the centenary of Lorca's birth, these poems, essays and letters are remarkable for their freshness and vitality, and go right to the heart of his extraordinary and passionate vision. Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was born near Granada. His works include The Gypsy Ballads (1928), Poem of the Deep Song (1931) and Poet in New York (1940), and the three tragedies, Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936). An inspiring friend and occasional collaborator of some of the great artists of his time, including Manuel de Falla, Salvador Dali and Pablo Neruda, he was also a mesmerising performer of his own work, a consummate musician and a theatrical innovator of genius. He was murdered in Granada at the height of his fame by Nationalist partisans on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Christopher Maurer is Head of the Spanish Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has published many editions and translations of Lorca's works, including Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990) and Selected Poems (Penguin, 1995). He is the author, with Maria E. Iglesias, of Shearwater: Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi, the story of an unusual southern family of potters, painters and writers (Doubleday, 2000).…