Earth and Cave

In 1965 Michael Heller and his wife went to live in Nerja a poor farming and fishing village on the Southern coast of Spain near Málaga, that nonetheless boasted several literary expatriates and summer residents like Garcia Lorca s brother and the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén. Heller was 28 and as he says in this brief but wonderfully evocative and luminous memoir he had burned his New York bridges and had come to this elemental place at the start of a then unarticulated commitment to writing, to poetry.