Sonnets of Dark Love

In The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, written toward the end of Lorca’s brief life, desire and death come together in poetic chiaroscuro. In these dark and final meditations and flashes of passion, the poet pays homage to Spanish mystics, to Italian masters of the sonnet, and to the Arab poets of his native Andalusia.

Bilingual edition translated by Jane Duran and Gloria García Lorca with essays by Christopher Maurer and Andrés Soria Olmedo.

‘This masterful bilingual edition from Enitharmon brings to light Federico García Lorca’s posthumously published works The Tamarit Divan and the Sonnets of Dark Love, alongside introductory essays. Suffused with Andalusian landscapes, jasmine, sunlight and heady sensuality, these poems are “full of love and agony”. Lorca invokes Spanish mystics, Italian sonneteers and Arabic poets with ghazals on lost love, longing and the urgency of desire and death. Written shortly before his assassination in the Spanish Civil War, this is Lorca at his most intimate, passionate and vulnerable, scouring the “night of the soul forever dark”.’

Alice Mullen, Poetry Book Society Bulletin