Poet in New York

Garcia Lorca's long out-of-print poetic sequence about New York City, newly translated in this bilingual edition, is as contemporary as today's headlines: slums, racism, violence and cries of loneliness punctuate this verse. Written during the Spanish playwright's nine-month stopover in 1929-30, and steeped in surrealistic technique, his unrelentingly negative antihymn reads the urban condition as symbolic of our culture's materialistic corruption of love and its degradation of nature. Yet one can question the current validity of Garcia Lorca's howl of protest. In vocalizing the stifled rage of Harlem, he implicitly views blacks as somehow more ""natural'' than whites. Conflicted about his own homosexuality, he elevates Whitmanesque love between ``camerados'' over what he sees as a decadent gay subculture. This effective if somewhat flat translation is accompanied by Garcia Lorca's letters and a lecture he delivered on this lyrical work. (March)