El contorno del abismo

Leopoldo María Panero occupies a singular space in contemporary Spanish poetry, among other things because he was, in addition to being a poet, a character with notable public projection. This detailed biography reconstructs his life and his legend, which he himself cultivated and which gave rise to countless anecdotes, some true and others apocryphal.This book appeared for the first time in 1999, and this new, expanded and revised edition covers the poet's entire life until his death in 2014. His childhood between Madrid and Astorga parades through its pages; Father Leopoldo Panero, a laureate poet and intellectual fond of the Franco regime, whose early death marked the family; Leopoldo María's complex relationships with his mother -Felicidad Blanc- and his two brothers -Juan Luis and Michi-, all of them protagonists of the mythical film by Jaime Chávarri El desencanto. It also shows his condition as a member of the generation of the so-called "newest" and his inclusion in the Castellet anthology Nueve novísimos; the repercussion of the powerful collection of poems This is how Carnaby Street was founded and the subsequent development of his work; his addiction to drugs and alcohol; the experience of his sexuality; his political dalliances and his relationship with madness, which led him to spend a good part of his life in mental hospitals; the friends who supported him and the freeloaders who hung around him; his transgressive vocation, his visionary illuminations and his personality always in conflict, on the brink of the abyss. This splendid book explores and explains the character in all his complexity. It is, without a doubt, the definitive biography of Leopoldo María Panero, the great cursed poet of contemporary Spanish literature.