Celda Verde/Green Cell: A Critical Introduction with Translations of the Poems

Pureza Canelo (b.1946) began to write poetry in the 1960s when Spain’s youngest writers were breaking away from the social realist approach of their precursors and embarking on quests of self-discovery. Her first volume, Celda verde, appeared in 1971, and her second, Lugar comun, published the same year, received the prestigious Adonais Prize. These early poems composed under the whimsical sign of a creacionista aesthetic move past the achievements of Spain’s literary patriarchs to reconfigure the subject within a feminine and poststructuralist framework. Canelo’s terrain is the unconscious; her fluid, semiotic language lingers in the mysterious gap between the symbolic and the real.