Poems of Consummation

First published in 1968, when the author was seventy, Poems of Consummation is Vicente Aleixandre’s intimate, philosophic, densely compressed lyric engagement with old age and the mystery of death. The poems are intense, mostly brief, elemental in their imagery (stone, ocean, wind, fire), and they address, in sometimes gnomic terms, the unknowable—mainly the paradoxes of memory: the simultaneous absence and presence of remembered love and the lover no longer living. The voice in these poems anticipates its own posthumousness, and speaks at times as if (and now in fact) from beyond the grave