[1][2] His poetry touched on themes of love, art, his own political commitment, drawing attention to wrongs, ethnography, physics, history, immateriality, mythology, the animal world, poetic expression, the passing of time, religion, society, language, agricultural labour, urbanism, and geography.

[3] Manuel María was the son of two well-to-do farmers, Antonio Fernández Núñez, who was the mayor of Outeiro de Rei, and Pastora Teixeiro Casanova.

This helped him get in touch with members of a group that met at the Méndez Núñez cafeteria: Luís Pimentel, Ánxel Fole, Juan Rof Codina, Aquilino Iglesia Alvariño, and others.

[4] In 1950 he published his first collection of poems, Muiñeiro de brétemas ("Miller of mists"), which inaugurated the so-called "Escola da Tebra" (School of Shadows).

His disappointment after failing the entrance exams to the University of Santiago inspired his second collection of poems, Morrendo a cada intre ("Dying every minute").

He did his military service in Santiago de Compostela and there he attended a gathering at Café Español, where he became a great friend of Carlos Maside.

One of the last campaigns in which he took part was in response to the Prestige oil spill disaster, under the names of Burla Negra (" Black Mockery") and the Plataforma Nunca Máis ("Never More" Platform).