I Have Lots Of Heart

I Have Lots of Heart (1997) by Miguel Hernández. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 9781852243326. Condition: Fine.

There are poets who cultivate mystery, poets who hide behind elaborate symbolism, and poets who seem determined to ensure nobody entirely understands what they mean until a doctoral thesis appears thirty years later. Miguel Hernández, by contrast, writes as though the human heart has burst open and insists you look inside.

It is difficult to accuse him of emotional restraint.

Born in 1910 into a poor goatherd’s family in southern Spain, Hernández had little formal education, yet became one of the country’s most remarkable poetic voices. His life was astonishingly brief, fiercely passionate and tragically entwined with the Spanish Civil War. He wrote of love, injustice, friendship, grief and hope with such directness that even today his poems feel startlingly alive. They don’t merely sit on the page; they seem determined to climb off it and accompany you home.

The title alone, I Have Lots of Heart, tells you rather a lot about what lies within. This is not poetry interested in fashionable cynicism or detached cleverness. Hernández believed, unfashionably perhaps, that words mattered because people mattered. Love mattered. Freedom mattered. Bread mattered. If that sounds wonderfully uncomplicated, don’t be fooled. Simplicity is often the hardest thing for a writer to achieve.

Like his friend Federico García Lorca, Hernández became one of the defining literary casualties of twentieth-century Spain. Unlike Lorca, he survived the war itself only to be imprisoned by Franco’s regime, eventually dying of tuberculosis in prison at the age of just thirty-one. His life reminds us that poets occasionally pay a far steeper price for their words than poor book sales or indifferent reviews.

Fortunately, the poems have endured rather better than the politics that sought to silence them.

This excellent Bloodaxe Books edition, published in 1997, brings Hernández to English-speaking readers with the care and literary sensitivity for which Bloodaxe has long been admired. Their editions have introduced countless readers to poets they might otherwise never have encountered, quietly performing the civilised service of reminding us that the world contains far more remarkable voices than whatever currently occupies the bestseller lists.

Reading Hernández is an oddly uplifting experience, even when he is writing about suffering. There is an immense vitality in his work, an insistence that beauty continues to exist alongside hardship, and that compassion remains worthwhile even when history appears to have temporarily misplaced it. His poems rarely feel like museum pieces. They breathe. They ache. They laugh occasionally. Above all, they refuse to surrender.

This copy remains in fine condition, preserving both the handsome production and the extraordinary writing within. It would make an excellent addition to the shelves of anyone who enjoys modern poetry, Spanish literature, or books that remind us literature can be both profoundly personal and deeply political without ever becoming preachy.

From Crappy Old Books—because every so often a slim volume arrives that quietly embarrasses the rest of the bookshelf. Here is someone who spent only thirty-one years on earth, tended goats, wrote unforgettable poetry, endured imprisonment, left behind verses that still resonate across languages, and somehow managed to make the rest of us feel we’ve been complaining rather a lot about trivial inconveniences. Not bad for a book with such a modest title. After a few pages, you’ll discover that Miguel Hernández didn’t merely have lots of heart—he had enough to lend a little to generations of readers who came after him.

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