SHADES OF PORTUGUESE POETRY

The beginnings of Portuguese poetry? Go back to the 12th century, around the time when the County of Portugal separated from the Kingdom of Galicia (in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula). Many poets and lyricists, prior to the Carnation Revolution in 1974, created works known as revolutionary songs, who represented the spirit of the revolution include Zeca Afonso and Sérgio Godinho. Many years before, the Modernism was responsible for the liberation of the complexity of the Portuguese view of themselves, mainly thanks to Fernando Pessoa. In the nineteenth century, Almeida Garrett (with his poem Camões), can consider that Romanticism, and its following consequences, became established in Portugal. It was with the Renaissance, that poets embarked on a new age of literature, due to influences from Italy and the peculiar experience of the Portuguese discoveries. Back in time again, epic poetry was produced, as was common in Romantic medieval regions. With the Portuguese expansion south, poetry preserved some of these main characteristics. https://www.amazon.com/Rain-Portugal-Poems-Billy-Collins/dp/0679644067

I’M GOING IN– Renata Correia Botelho

At the piano, a body primed for everything to be born again, the fingered promise of return to that circular meeting place, where we no longer remember who we are, nor for whom we wept. We warm up our wind whipped hands, the skin gradually melting into wings, the blood into forests and rivers. This is how it starts, we see the morning from afar and wait for a face to be drawn for us.

THE WEIGHT OF BOOKS – Filipa Leal

I was thinking books are weightless. I mean, they float upon the understanding. Upon memory. Or even better: they are steady because they are not people. They have no nights, no insomnia. They have no sleep in them. I was thinking books are less complicated than us. Even when we run out of a line, of a word. Even when we can’t quite breathe. When I thought about that I had a vague notion of entitlement. And a pale breath wishing to be a page.