This is a bilingual edition, with the Spanish and English on facing pages. Hernandez, originally a goatherd, fought on the Republican side in the Civil War and when it ended spent the rest of his short life in Francoist prisons. When he died of TB in 1942, he was not yet 32 and left a young widow and a small son whom he had never seen. His poetry has been included in many anthologies over the years, but this book of 160 pages offers a reasonably wide choice of his vibrant, generous-minded verse, much of it written in prison. There are also brief reminiscences of Hernandez by his fellow-poets Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti and Vicente Aleixandre.