Publisher's Synopsis
Dulce Marìa Loynaz (1902-1997) is Cuba's most celebrated poet. Widely published in Spain during the 1950s, Loynaz's poetry was forgotten in Cuba after the Revolution. International recognition came to her late: at the age of ninety she was living in seclusion in Havana when the Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. In the first comprehensive selection and translation of her poems, James O'Connor brings to English speakers the haunting voice of this extraordinary poet whom the Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez terms in his Foreword, 'archaic and new...tender, weightless, rich in abandon'.
The first English publication of her work, Against Heaven contains a selection of poems from each of Loynaz's books, including the acclaimed prose poems from Poems with No Names, and a selection of posthumously published work.
