Like a glazier reconstructing a mirror broken into a hundred shards, Eduardo Moga assembles a portrait of his father, thirty years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his whole life in the grey, grey hardscrabble years of the Franco dictatorship when it was 'as if everybody's feet smelt'. He is seen with a forensic clarity through now a child's, now an adult's eyes and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits, angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga's great achievement, he is a real living person. Moga writes with lyrical depth about fathers who bequeath the best of themselves to their sons and sow only distance, and about sons who cannot forgive their fathers' vulgarity and cannot forgive their own estrangement and lack of sympathy. Jose Angel Cilleruelo, El Balcon de Enfrente In this splendid book Eduardo Moga dissects not just the story of a family but the story of Spain. Francisco H. Gonzalez, Devaneos

I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about the city over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn’t find anything written earlier. The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront. I didn’t select the poems on the basis of form or style. Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark contains every kind of expression, tradition, sensibility and voice – the only benchmark for inclusion was quality. So the anthology, as well as being a balanced history, is also a display of the breadth of styles of current Spanish poetry, and of the poetry of the past. The poems had to have been already published. I wasn’t looking for new work, but for a significant historical record. —Eduardo Moga

We have become used to a life of routine and uniformity: at work, in our relationships with others and with ourselves when we seek to understand what surrounds and subjugates us. Messages flood in and, instead of criticising reality, they reinforce the status quo and encourage us to accept it and maintain it. To counterbalance the hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga's, which don't mourn a presumed lost golden age, or bewail their disillusionment. That phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that the gods do not love us, but torment us, and then put all his efforts into unlearning it all. Moga's poetry does not preach, however, or burden us with rules or ideas to bring us to an imaginary better world, here or in the afterlife. The only life is this, the here and now, the life of the body, the life of the senses connecting us to the world. To restore our delight in the present is not a trivial mission and Moga confronts us time and again with our emotions and sensations, with the intention of blotting out thereby the monotonous discourse of the representatives of order. One might think, then, that the poet is acting like a strategist on a battlefield. Far from the Manichaean vision of the soldier, who is unable to see beyond dualities, this poetry is nourished by subtlety, detail and precision. It is not artillery, but a fine wielding of the scalpel which, with the delicacy and determination of the silversmith, dissects the tumour and cyst threatening our life, which is then able to flourish as a result.