Jamie Gil de Biedma (Author) Jaime Gil de Biedma is widely recognized as Spain's finest poet since Garcia Lorca. Born in 1929, his childhood and almost entire adult life were bracketed by the bloody civil war and Franco's fascist state. Yet rooted in Barcelona, he managed to become a cosmopolitan poet, lived as a clandestine leftist and gay man, and published three books of poetry under strict censorship. His poetry is collected in the anthology Las personas del verbo (1975). He died of AIDS in 1990, and since the publication of his diaries, he has become the icon of a passionate literary cult.
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In Gil de Biedma, masterfully translated by James Nolan, I read a poetry that survives under pressure. These are poems that yearn for a lost Spain as our speaker longs for his youth. As Nolan attests in his introduction, these poems don't know that Almodovar will swagger down Calle Amor de Dios in a few years. Poetry outlasts Franco and AIDS. A poet like Gil de Biedma will add to the record of what life was like under oppression. Gil de Biedma fills in what was lost. - Spencer Reece