[…] The poet was then 19 years old and was studying Philosophy and Literature at the University of Madrid. A brand-new youth that had grown up in the open Zamoran countryside, listening to the brisk sound of the Duero and drinking high and pure air, burst into song with a firm voice, thick in sap and fragrance. Gift of Inebriation was one single, long poem, shaken by the love of light, air, and the free and virgin fields. What was most surprising about that youth poetry was its tense, naked body, entirely devoid of the usual rhetoric, of the alarming poet who conceals the void or of the pedantic, contrived sonnet. Running the risk of monotony, Claudio Rodríguez wrote the whole poem in free or assonance-rhymed hendecasyllables. Yet his song was so natural and so true that the flatter of rhyme had no business there. The poem was self-sufficient in its naked, shaken truth.
[…] With his second book, Conjurings, Claudio Rodríguez has fully confirmed the hopes that we deposited on him when he published Gift of Inebriation. He is a full-length poet, and his poetry, tender and lively, has smell and taste, like crispbread of deep yeast giving off true light and sap.