The career of José Angel Valente (1929–2000) took shape slowly and organically over the course of several decades. As he himself suggests in this prose poem from Mandorla, his writing is an unhurried process of development analogous to the formation of natural substances. Ultimately, the process by which his work assumed its definitive identity, especially in the final two decades of his life, was both prolonged and coherent, yielding a poetic work of enormous seriousness and depth. Valente emerged in the 1950s as one of several poets subsequently included by literary historians in the so-called 'generation of the 1950s,' one of whose trademark gestures was the use of an ironic, often self-deprecating speaker intent on subtly denouncing the moral mediocrity of Francoist society in general and coopted intellectuals in particular. In the 1980s, however, during Spain's transition to democracy, he increasingly distanced himself from his generational contemporaries. At the time of his death on July 18, 2000, he was identified primarily as the standard bearer of a belated though still powerful 'high modernist' tradition in Spanish poetry. The shift from the socially oriented poetry of his first books to the 'essentialist' modernism of the 1980s and 1990s took place gradually, in a series of books published in the 1960s and 1970s, so that it is impossible to establish a clear line of demarcation between the early and the late Valente. It is clear, however, that Valente's unique role within recent Spanish poetry was to be the intellectual leader of those poets championing the belated avant-garde/modernist tradition in contemporary Spain. [Source: BITRA]