Ángel Gaztelu, of Basque origin, settled in Cuba in 1927 and pursued his ecclesiastical career at the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary in Havana. He remained on the island until shortly after the triumph of the Revolution, at which point he emigrated to the United States and settled in Miami. As far as is known, he did not continue his poetic career once in that city and served as a parish priest until his death.

Angel Gatzelu’s religiosity extends naturally to his poetry, a fervor that he reaches through the senses, from a communion with nature through which he accesses the creator, an attitude more of consubstantiation than merely contemplation.

He is interested in the sensible world as an extension of the divine breath and incorporates it into his poetic symbolism with a transcendent purpose. His poetry recalls Fray Luis de León’s cult of divinity, a figure he pays homage to in one of his texts and who constitutes a model of lyricism and religiosity at the same time, without diminishing his originality, also fertilized by the insular.

He moved equally naturally within traditional poetic forms, such as the décima and the sonnet, and in a free verse of refined musicality. In this sense, he preferred assonant and sometimes diluted rhymes, which have a certain haphazardness in the arrangement of words; his aesthetic, however, had a strong root in the fruitful apprehension of the world, a directly derived beauty.

His verses exude a certain neoclassicism in their sentimental restraint; but they also contain a baroque quality that is not merely a linguistic artifice but an exuberance of reality and its creatures. His poetry blends harmoniously with Cuban culture, without anguish or rupture, searching for tradition and incorporating the natural flow from the remote sources of lyricism.

He contributed to numerous periodicals, in addition to the magazine “Orígenes,” including “Grafos,” “Musicalia,” “Verbum,” “Espuela de Plata,” “Nadie Parecer,” “La Fortnight,” and “Islas,” among others. As part of his religious duties, he also authored “The Parish Church of the Holy Spirit of Havana. Historical Review.” Devotion and lyricism are interwoven in its pages with remarkable artistic flair.