TEXT TO BE READ FOR THE BLIND POETRY

“More than anything else, a poet” is how Cunqueiro was described by his friend and also poet Miguel González Garcés.

The major success of his narrative works and his extensive journalistic production eclipsed his great accomplishment as a poet to the eyes of the public.

His early poems were published in Mondoñedo’s journal Vallibria in 1930. Cunqueiro was at the time a promising young poet who was an active member of the Partido Galeguista political party.

In 1932, when he was twenty-two, he published his first volume of poems, Mar ao Norde, with which he brings the renewed air of the avant-garde movements to the Galician language. The work was published by Ánxel Casal and illustrated by Luis Seoane.

His two volumes of poems are Poemas do si e non and Cantiga Nova que se chama Riveira. The latter volume is where Cunqueiro delves into the so-called Neotrovadorismo, a movement formally inspired on Galician-Portuguese medieval poetry.

The path the writer had been following got mixed up when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and Cunqueiro joined the Falange political party. During those years he published his only volume of poems in Spanish Elegías y canciones, in 1940.

In 1950 he published Dona do corpo delgado, a work which was followed by a long period of poetic silence. But Cunqueiro never stopped writing poetry. Eventually, in 1980, close to his final hour, he published Herba de aquí ou acolá, a compilation of the verses he had little by little been writing throughout previous decades.

This work culminates his career as a poet and sets the bases for the renewal of Galician poetry, which began in the 1980s.