Antonio Colinas is usually identified with the novísimo (very new) poets of the late 1960s and 1970s--writers such as Pere Gimferrer, Guillermo Carnero, Antonio Carvajal, Luis Antonio de Villena, and Jaime Siles, among many others, who led a growing reaction against the social poetry that had dominated the postwar era in Spain; they introduced a more imaginative, self-conscious, and aesthetically achieved verse that was closer to mainstream European modernism. Over the years these poets have often been accused of culturalism, that is, of being aestheticists who burden their poetry with ornamentation and unnecessary artistic allusions. The reproach has some validity in terms of the early work of a few--Gimferrer or Villena, for example--but it cannot be applied to Colinas, who, though attracted to formal beauty and artistic allusion, seeks a meditative poetry oriented toward an exploration of the self and nature. This approach makes him stand...