After Lorca

"Like all of Spicer's best work, After Lorca is "an argument between the dead and the living." He was haunted by Jean Cocteau's image of Orpheus as a poet taking dictation from the beyond through radio broadcasts only he could hear-he liked to say his own messages might be coming from Martians. But as he wrote in his 1965 book Language, "The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios/ don't develop scar tissue.""--