One Year and Three Months

Description:

These poems, written during the illness of the poet's wife and just after her death, narrate a journey of love and pain.

Brief description: Luis García Montero is one of Spain's foremost contemporary literary figures: poet, scholar, novelist, essayist, script writer, lyricist and since 2018 director of Spain's Cervantes Institute. He helped forge a literary movement called "the poetry of experience," drawing on personal history and everyday language to craft universal motifs of depth and complexity. García Montero's foundational poetry collections include Habitaciones separadas (Separate Rooms), winner of Spain's National Poetry Prize, and La intimidad de la serpiente (The Intimacy of the Serpent), winner of the National Critics Award and Un año y tres meses (One Year and Three Months), winner of the 2022 Madrid Critic's Prize. In 2024, García Montero was honored with Mexico's International Carlos Fuentes Award for his lifetime contribution to Spanish language literature.

Review Quotes:

In One Year and Three Months, Luis García Montero reckons with the illness and death of his wife of 30 years, Almudena Grandes, an award-winning novelist. Step by step, the poems, beautifully rendered in Katie King's masterful translations, grapple with memory and loss, and convey their struggle as a battle "in the final trenches of our hearts." While the poet maintains that "death now, I confess / and speak the truth, / is not a literary matter," it is precisely in these moving and powerful poems that García Montero gives expression to his mourning and makes it so intensely personal and intimate that readers feel and share the deep sense of loss.