Uxio NovoneyraUxío Novoneyra (1930-1999) was one of the greatest Galician poets of the 20th century. Steadfast in defense of his Galician language and culture in the face of the homogenizing forces of centralist Spain, he produced a poetic oeuvre rich in sound, sylable, silence, and gesture. He was a poet of Courelian Galician, a man of a remote mountain heritage and accent shaped over thousands of years before it arrived in his chest and mouth and on his tongue. Influenced by the medieval Iberian troubadours and by poetries from Persia and China to the Caribbean, through the Old Testament bumping against the Beats, Novoneyra was devoted to language and to all that speaks outside language but that language yearns to bring into mention. Having lived the brutal decades of Francoist dictatorship in Spain, he spoke always on behalf of freedom and the rights of peoples. He saw popular culture and language as essential to any avant-garde. He was a poet of the Land, of the equality of grasses and human being, of the weather, of the stones. Today we'd call him an eco-poet. He was a poet of silence, of re-envisioning; his classic The Uplands (1955, still in print) was one he wrote through as a life-work. Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Novoneyra is a towering presence, even twenty years after his death, in Galicia. His spirit of defiance and of love is still alive in Galician poetry today. Read More Read Less