Poems of Consummation

First published in 1968, when the author was seventy, Poems of Consummation is Vicente Aleixandre’s intimate, philosophic, densely compressed lyric engagement with old age and the mystery of death. The poems are intense, mostly brief, elemental in their imagery (stone, ocean, wind, fire), and they address, in sometimes gnomic terms, the unknowable—mainly the paradoxes of memory: the simultaneous absence and presence of remembered love and the lover no longer living. The voice in these poems anticipates its own posthumousness, and speaks at times as if (and now in fact) from beyond the grave

Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977.

Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator and editor. Born in Los Angeles in 1947, he received his BA in languages and literature from Bard College and an MA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He published his first essays and criticism in the early 1970s, and his reviews, columns, articles, features and interviews have appeared steadily since then in dozens of magazines and newspapers, chiefly in Northern California. He was the founding editor and publisher of the international journal Alcatraz (1979-1985) and of the Santa Cruz newsweekly The Sun (1986-1989). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of Luis Cernuda, and is the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. His recent books include NEED I SAY MORE? (El Leon Literary Arts, 2015), WHERE WAS I? (Greenhouse Review Press, 2015), the poetry collection SCRATCH PEGASUS (Swan Scythe Press, 2013), translations of Vicente Aleixandre, the essay collection THE TOLSTOY OF THE ZULUS (El Leon Literary Arts, 2011), and the novel THE MENTAL TRAVELER (Greenhouse Review Press, 2010).From 1999 through 2014 he was the editor of the award-winning literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. He lives in Santa Cruz.