Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark

I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide selection of poems written about the city over the past two centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I couldn’t find anything written earlier. The poems had to be recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasn’t about to enter into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront. I didn’t select the poems on the basis of form or style. Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark contains every kind of expression, tradition, sensibility and voice – the only benchmark for inclusion was quality. So the anthology, as well as being a balanced history, is also a display of the breadth of styles of current Spanish poetry, and of the poetry of the past. The poems had to have been already published. I wasn’t looking for new work, but for a significant historical record. —Eduardo Moga