How to write a review of a work that I barely understand, but find so beautiful I have to give it 5 bright, and shining stars? 
 I bought my first copy of Poet in New York over 40 years ago. It was Ben Bellit's translation. Mr. Bellit has also translated Pablo Neruda. I can't say as I find any of his translations readable. But, I persevered, opening the book every now and then, and finding the lines mostly incomprehensible blamed the translation and said, "Maybe later." 
 The new Simon and White translation came out in 1988, and got a lot of praise, so, I filed it away in my mind, and finally bought it used last year. (I found it at Vargo's Books, an eccectric and popular bookstore in Bozeman, Montana.) It sat on the shelf, until its time finally came. 
 I'm here to report Poet in New York remains mostly incomprehensible, though the translation seems to flow much more easily than the Bellit. I want to add the caveat that there are people who can read Poet in New York more deeply than I, and come up with terrific ideas about what Garcia Lorca is doing - I thank them for the efforts though it wasn't until I read what the poet said he was trying to do that I got any closer to understanding. For that, see below. 
 When I finally read William Burrough's, Naked Lunch, (yes, I'm one of the few and the brave who actually read the whole damn, incomprehensible ((there's that word again)) thing )I told myself that I could easily press on to just about anything. 
 I have come to learn there's the bizarrely incomprehensible (Naked Lunch,) and the extraordinarily beautiful incomprehensible - Poet in New York. 
 Poet in New York tracks Garcia Lorca's first visit to a foreign country, and, according to the poet, is his conscious leap into a world of images that he pushes beyond surrealism. He's trying to create poems as things that stand alone in space and time. He's not manipulating the world to get at something deeper, he's summoning from the depths. I get it, and I get that what I have to do is read, without expectations, as if I were listening to - what? - not the Oracle at Delphi because I'd be parsing a prophecy there, but maybe to a mind-traveller from another planet. Ok, there's pleasure to be found there, and the pleasure I find with Poet in New York is in lines and stanzas that stand outside of whole poems and shimmer. (Am I making any sense?) 
 In "Double Poem of Lake Eden," I find this: 
 I want to cry because I feel like it - 
 the way children cry in the last row of seats... 
 (My note: that struck me not only as an emotional jolt, but a perfect image I could place in a dark theater, or bright classroom.) 
 because I'm not a man, not a poet, not a leaf, 
 only a wounded pulse that circles the things of the other side. 
 (My note: The poet reduced to a "wounded pulse" resonates at a pretty deep level, and the idea of a spirit "circling the things of the other side," certainly lifts my head off. And that's the truth of Lorca - his work is the essence of Dickenson's recognition of poetry.) 
 Or here's a line from Dance of Death: The dead are engrossed in devouring their own hands. 
 Or this, from Little Stanton: In the house where there is cancer,/ the white walls shatter in the delirium of astronomy. (My note: This is about a child diagnosed with cancer, so of course "the white walls shatter..." And the "delirium of astronomy," comes at me like galaxies blown apart and scattered by the grief of it all. Now, I'm just making stuff up here, so...) 
 I could go on. Almost every poem in the collection contains lines mysterious and head-lifting. Garcia Lorca is the poet of the deep song, canto hondo, and duende - knowledge and action in the presence of death. 
 The final section (X) is called The Poet Arrives in Havana. It's comprised of one poem, Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms, and it starts: 
 As soon as the full moon rises, I'm going to Santiago, Cuba/I'm going to Santiago... 
 The poet and the poem are ecstatic at leaving New York. So was I. 
 I will, of course, be revisiting Poet in New York, for now, I'm thrilled to have finally read it.