This is another book I read a few months back as I worked my way through the earliest publications of Francisco García Lorca. The poems are built around the idea of a musical suite, with each "suite" providing a series of variations on a single theme. They are for the most part very sparse in their language and simple in their form. A common theme is the pursuit of lyric inspiration in liminal spaces and times: the surface of the water as a space between the depths of the ocean and the air; the surface of a mirror as the space between the image and its reflection; dawn or dusk as the moment between day and night; and the moment between sleep and wakefulness as the stage for a pair of journeys to lands of poetry. I think it's fair to relate the poetic endeavors of Lorca here to the principles of creationism proposed by Vicente Huidobro around the same time. These liminal areas form something like the staging ground for Lorca's development of invented poetic images.

Unfortunately, I returned the book to the library (it's my goal over the holiday to catch up on my reviews), and so I'm struggling a bit to remember specific examples that might help you understand what I'm talking about. Oh well. I do recall why I appreciated this book so much. I'd spent a lot of time reading Libro de poemas, Lorca's first book of poetry, because I saw it as a rather autobiographical documentation of the poet's coming of age, where he repeatedly attempts to encounter something, a poetic voice or an appropriate form of lyric expression. There's a common thread of searching, of paths and journeys, that unites many of the poems in that book. Near the end, there is a series of poems from 1919 where Lorca seems to have found something, or to have become capable of expressing what he's been trying to express all along. Around that time in his life, he wrote some letters where he expressed his conviction that he had become a poet and was indeed suffering "truly lyrical episodes," or something like that. Around the time that he wrote the poems that were destined for Suites, he seemed to be full of confidence and happy to have encountered a mode of expression that he felt to be authentic. So when reading Suites, I felt that I was reading Lorca's first success, the first book that he fully and truly believed in. I would like in turn to see its investigations into liminal spaces and pure, simple images as something of a condensed version of Lorca's beliefs with regard to lyric expression: these are poems stripped down to their purest, most authentic form. His years of growth, development and search for a true poetry culminated in Suites, his arrival to a lyric maturity. Then, after this, he started pursuing other vehicles to create poems that retained something of the pure poetry of his suites, but were constructed around different elements that attracted him or played a central role in his life: the gypsy lifestyle and the popular songs of Andalucía, for example, in Canciones and Romancero gitano, or his rather eye-opening experience in the North American urban environment as reflected in Poeta en Nueva York. I'd like to think that in a way the experience of writing the suites never left him, and that he continued to recall his early poetic endeavors even as he dressed his poems up in new ways and incorporated new inspirations and experiences into his creative processes. ( )