While the Men Are Dying

Carmen Conde (1907-1996) lived and worked in the Republican zone during the Spanish Civil War while her husband served at the front line. Her third collection of poetry, While the Men are Dying was written in Valencia as bombs fell, her city endured privation and her country was being torn apart. When the war ended, a known pro-Republican intellectual, she went into hiding and was forced to write under pseudonyms to make a living. These prose poems which describe the full horror of the impact of war on a civilian population and which empathise deeply with the sacrifice of the young men at the front were first published in Spain thirty years later, by then too late to be recognised as some of the most important and powerful poetry to emerge from the Spanish Civil War.