Gathering Ocnos and Variations on a Mexican Theme, Written in Water brings together Luis Cernuda’s prose poems of childhood, desire, exile and place.

Cernuda returns to the courtyards, gardens and changing light of Seville while writing from the condition of permanent displacement. After leaving Spain during the Civil War, he lived in Britain, the United States and finally Mexico. His prose, fuelled by memory, remakes a lost world with deep precision. 

A central poet of Spain’s Generation of ’27, Cernuda writes prose that moves with poetry’s density but retains the reflective freedom of the essay. Weather, music, rooms and landscapes become vessels for desire; the physical world seems continually on the verge of disclosing something it cannot quite say. The later Mexican pieces complicate nostalgia by finding affinities between a newly encountered landscape and the Spain that survives inside him.

Translated from Spanish by Stephen Kessler, this is for readers drawn to Lorca, Paz, Gansel and writing around exile.

City Lights Books, 2004. Paperback. Very good condition with light edge and corner wear; clean internally and firmly bound.