The works of the twentieth-century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) are characterised by their fragmentary and disunified nature, with a wide range of complexities and contradictions. Concentrating on the well-known La realidad y el deseo, Dr McKinlay considers the poems from the perspective of the widespread loss of faith in God, exploring the tension between Cernuda's perception of chaos and desire for order, which co-exist in dialectical opposition. NEIL C. MCKINLAY is college lecturer in Spanish at New College, Oxford.