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Martín-Estudillo, Luis. La mirada elíptica: el trasfondo barroco de la poesía española contemporánea. Madrid: Visor, 2007. 204 pp. La mirada elíptica is an erudite and theoretically-informed contribution to the study of contemporary Spanish poetry. The organization of this book is thematic: after an introductory chapter that explores the connections between the seventeenth-century baroque and the twentieth-century neo-baroque, the remaining four chapters address four relevant critical problems: the lyric subject, temporality, ekphrasis, and metapoetry, respectively. In each case, Martín-Estudillo elucidates his theme through a series of close readings of poems by authors like Guillermo Carnero, Pere Gimferrer, Jenaro Talens, Antonio Colinas, Rosa Romojaro, Luis Antonio de Villena, Antonio Gamoneda and Felipe Benítez Reyes. The central insight of this book is that the "elipse," the "figura fundamental" of the baroque, "nos revela la cara oculta de la Modernidad y señala la fractura de sus fundamentos" (18).
Although La mirada elípitica does not claim to be a study of the "novísmos" per se, the poets of this group clearly dominate the book. (Guillermo Carnero, the only poet to appear in each of the four analytical chapters, serves as a kind of unifying axis.) The decision to include both older and younger poets has one clear advantage: it frees Martín-Estudillo from the obligation of entering into tired debates about the course of recent Spanish...