Since the publication of his first book, Subida al amor (Ascent to Love) in 1945, Carlos Bousoño has emerged from the crowd that formed Spain's first post-civil war poetic generation to become an important figure in the history of twentieth-century Spanish letters. Not only does he stand effectively alone as perhaps the best poet among this early postwar group (and one of the few Spanish poets now approaching, or in, their sixties whose poetry continues to be innovative) but he has also, and unquestionably, distinguished himself as the finest Spanish literary theorist of the last forty years. As another great poet, Francisco Brines, has maintained, it is Bousoño's steady growth as an artist over a lifetime that "le [sitúa], a mi modo de ver, como el poeta más vivo de su generación" ([ranks] him, in my opinion, as the...