José Luis Puerto

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José Luis Puerto (b. 1953) was born in the village of La Alberca, in the Sierra de Francia of Salamanca Province. Graduating from the University of Salamanca with a degree in Romance Philology, he served as secretary to Rafael Alberti. In addition to his many volumes of poetry, he has edited several anthologies, translated Portuguese poetry, and produced works of ethnography focusing primarily on folk legends of Northern Spain. He has taught in Sevilla, Segovia and León, where he now resides with his wife María.
      Puerto’s poetry weds the celebration of sensuality we associate with Neruda with a contemplative insight reminiscent of Rilke: a voice of praise whose plenitude embraces loss, loneliness, mortality, frailty. At once continuum and encounter, his vision is rooted in the landscape of the natural world and the soul’s deep cultural memory, where advent has not suffered oblivion: directing our attention to the promise within the dormant seed, he calls us to hearken to the angel of the ordinary. Renunciation and annunciation: the two poles of his world, pulsing with luminous humility.