Poetry always played a constant and privileged role within Álvaro Cunqueiro's diverse literary output. From Mar ao norde (Sea to the North, 1932), his first book of poems, to his last poems--published as Herba aquí ou acolá (Grass Here or There) in volume one of his Obra en Galego completa (Complete Galician Works, 1980-1991), then separately published in 1988--Cunqueiro cherished the genre, and he mostly wrote poems in Galician. However, his narrative and journalistic work, quantitatively greater, especially after the Spanish Civil War, is written largely in Castilian. Despite the language difference there are thematic and formal parallels between his fiction and poetry. The roots of this generic transcodification should be seen in the context of Galician literature which, after Francisco Franco's triumph, showed a disenchantment with "pure poetry" and found the only valid determinant of literary worth in the engagement of the poetic voice with...