{"product_id":"9780985612221","title":"Poems of Consummation","description":"\u003cp\u003eFirst published in Spain in 1968, when the author was seventy, Vicente Aleixandre's Poems of Consummation is an eloquent lyrical encounter with themes of Eros, memory, old age, death, and oblivion. In language both elemental and metaphysical, simple and profound, sensual and philosophical, the poet explores the paradoxes of consciousness in the face of individual mortality, celebrating the kiss and the sexual embrace as mysteriously enduring evidence of having lived. Without feel-good bromides or false optimism, yet with courage and a bracing engagement with unanswerable questions, Aleixandre reveals the consolation and inspiration of language pressed to the limits of the unsayable. In Stephen Kessler's translation, echoes of the Spanish can be heard in an American English that sings to the contemporary ear with the musical nuance, clarity, strangeness, beauty, and depth of the original.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne of Spain's leading twentieth-century poets, Vicente Aleixandre received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. Born in Seville in 1898, he came of age in Madrid as a key member of the Generation of 1927-a cohort that included such figures as Rafael Alberti, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Luis Cernuda, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Sali-nas, among others-and remained at his family home there during and after the civil war because of his fragile health. As the resident link to that generation (most of them driven into exile or, in Lorca's case, killed), Aleixandre played a crucial role in mentoring younger Spanish poets, in addition to producing more than a dozen important volumes of original poetry and prose. His selected poems in English, A Longing for the Light, appeared in 1978. He died in Madrid in 1984.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Commonwealth Books, Black Widow","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47017703473392,"sku":"9780985612221","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780985612221_p0.jpg?v=1772805400","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780985612221","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}