Federico García Lorca was one of Spain's great artists of the 20th century and has had a huge influence on poets writing today, both in his native language and in many others. A poet, playwright and theatre director, he was part of the Generation of '27 group, which helped to introduce the influence of surrealism, symbolism and other movements to Spanish writing and culture. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, on 19 August 1936, Lorca was murdered by Franquist rebel soliders and his books publicly burned. His remains have never been located. The late Irish poet Michael Smith, who translated extensively from the Spanish, here translates Federico García Lorca's Divan Del Tamarit / The Tamarit Poems, a work which expresses and celebrates Federico García Lorca's abiding interest in Arab-Andalusian culture and is testament to the intensity, sometime strangeness and beauty of his vision. See Lorca at Wikipedia