More than 250 quatrains of love and loss, the texts to those inimitable flamenco performances - these are the songs that are wailed by those keening male voices, as the red-and-black-clad women dancers stamp, pirouette and fire castanet rhythms at machine-gun pace. Not high art certainly, but a part of deeper fabric of the real Spain, and a powerful influence on poets such Lorca.

Vernica Volkow is one of Mexico's most significant poets in the post-Paz period. The centrepiece of the book is her astonishing sequence 'Arcana', with one poem for each card in the Tarot pack. Other long poems are featured, together with some shorter lyrics, to give an overview of this remarkable poet's oeuvre. Bilingual edition.

Amorgos Notebook (Cuaderno de Amorgos) is a collection from 2007 that won for Elsa Cross Mexico's most prestigious poetry prize, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, especially valued by its recipients as the winner is chosen by her peers in the literary world. Elsa Cross' work over the past several decades has demonstrated a considerable fascination with Greece, and this sequence takes its departure from the island of Amorgos, in the Cyclades, home of remarkable ancient sculptures, and spectacular terrain.

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.

Antonio Machado is, without a doubt, the father of modern Spanish lyric poetry: a bridge that stretches between Becquer, Ruben Dario and the generation of Jimenez, Lorca, Alberti, Guillen, Cernuda, Aleixandre and Otero. An early visit to Paris and an engagement with Symbolism, and its Spanish equivalent, modernism, in the shape of Ruben Dario, was to determine his course as a poet. Machado, however, unlike many of the French symbolists and perhaps because he was Spanish, never turned his back on common reality. Rather, reality and natural images were sacred to him as mysterious cyphers, flickering shadows at the mouth of the Cave. He was a deeply humanitarian poet; he believed in human emotions and intuitions, and he was always opposed to the baroque in Spanish poetry because he saw it as cerebral or conceptual and therefore an inadequate means of receiving significances from the temporal flux in which human beings live. This edition is fully bilingual.

Perhaps the greatest of Spain's Renaissance poets, Fernando de Herrera (1534-97), a native of Seville, was the writer who took on board the experiments with Italian forms carried out by his predecessors Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega (whose work he edited and annotated), and made of them a native style. As it was with many other poets elsewhere - such as Sir Thomas Wyatt in England - the example of Petrarch, both directly, and as mediated by Garcilaso, was crucial in the development of Herrera's elegant vernacular verse in Spanish. With Garcilaso, Boscan and Herrera, Spanish poetry takes wing. The generation that followed Herrera was to be the greatest literary flowering in Spanish history.

Anibal Nunez (1944-1987) has been described as the best Spanish poet of his generation, sometimes called the generation of '68. His recognition has been a long time coming, no doubt due to the fact that he stood outside the accepted currents of his time. Poet, painter, essayist and translator, he died young, but left behind a very large body of work which has only begun to receive its due in recent years, as the critical orthodoxy in Spain has begun to accommodate his singular vision.

Elsa Cross (born 1946) is one of Mexico's most significant contemporary poets, and this is the first full-length collection of her work in English - a long overdue but welcome opportunity for Anglo-American readers to get a sense of the full breadth of her work. The work selected for this volume concentrates on her longer poems, which are at the core of Elsa Cross' work - ranging from the remarkable "Bacchantes", which dates from the late '70s and early '80s and offered here in full, through "Malabar Canto" - suffused with the spirit of India - to the odes, dithyrambs and elegies of the recent Greek-inflected works. Elsa Cross' work is typified by its strong metaphysical orientation, coupled with a dazzling surface and remarkable imagery, and offers the English-speaking reader a new experience. A poetry to be savoured, thanks to the efforts of the five translators at work here, all of whom worked closely with the author to bring these poems successfully across the language barrier.

This is the first book-length collection of the poetry of Juan Antonio Villacanas in English, and enables Anglophone readers to meet for the first time one of the most significant Spanish poets of the post-war period. The translations are by the renowned Irish poet-translator Michael Smith and the author's daughter, Beatriz.

The first substantial collection of Claudio Rodriguez's work in English offers the complete poems, in a bilingual edition. Translated by Michael Smith (also responsible for the Shearsman editions of Becquer, Vallejo and Rosalia de Castro) and Luis Ingelmo (who worked on the Becquer edition with Michael Smith), this is as good an introduction as it is possble to get for an unfamiliar, yet major literary figure. Perhaps the most important poet of the "50s" generation in Spain, Rodriguez's work deserves to be much better-known in the anglophone world.

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer was one of Spain's most important poets of the 19th century, and the instigator of a new Spanish version of Romanticism, influenced by German models such as Heine. Born in Seville in 1836, the son of an artist of Flemish origin, he lived only 34 years, but in that time created a hugely influential body of verse (his Rimas, or Rhymes) as well as several short fictions (the Leyendas, or Legends). His other works include a remarkable series of letters, or epistolary fictions, published as Desde mi celda (From My Cell). Orphaned at the age of five, Becquer was raised by an elderly, and childless, uncle. A talented artist himself - as was also his brother, Valeriano - he became a pupil at a local studio in Seville, but gave this up in favour of a literary career, heading for Madrid at the age of eighteen, full of hope. He obtained a minor post in the civil-service, thanks to his uncle's influence, but was not cut out for such a routine job and was dismissed. For some time thereafter he was a typical Bohemian artist, living on very little while trying to write, and scratching a small income from the translation of foreign novels, and from part-time journalism.Towards the end of his life he obtained another government post, as a censor, but when he died, it was in considerable poverty, suffering from pneumonia and liver problems. His work was only published posthumously, thanks to the efforts of his friends.