‘Down from the mountain they forbade us swarm frantic men, brandishing their manuals of transcendental reason.’ The mountain is of course Mount Olympus, and the frantic men Spain’s all-male poetry establishment bent on excluding women from all their activities. ‘Not to confront them,’ continues Erika Martinez, ‘would be to bow one’s head in shame in front of one’s own mirror.’

Women poets have only been published in numbers in Spain in the last 25 years and still account for only 15% of the poetry books published every year. The Premio Nacional de Poesia has been awarded 52 times and been won by a woman 4 times. It isn’t at all uncommon for influential anthologies to be all-male or include at most one or two women among twenty men. Women are usually absent from the lists of the most venerable publishers. The founder of Visor, Jesus Garcia Sanchez, known affectionately as Chus Visor, recently declared in El Mundo’s culture supplement: ‘…women’s poetry doesn’t bear comparison to men’s. There wasn’t an important woman poet in the whole of the twentieth century and there isn’t one now.’

This neglect and disdain (gradually diminishing in the new generation) and the consequent delay in the appearance of Spanish women poets in translation was one of the motives for this anthology, but to bring their musical, lucid, forthright poems to English readers is its principal intent. -from Terence Dooley’s Afterword to this volume

This is the first anthology of its kind to appear in the UK, and features ten poets: Pilar Adon, Martha Asuncion Alonso, Graciela Baquero, Mercedes Cebrian, Maria Eloy-Garcia, Berta Garcia Faet, Erika Martinez, Elena Medel, Miriam Reyes and Julieta Valero - one born in the 1960s, six in the 1970s and three in the 1980s.