Poetry
Poemas
Not translated into English
Arménio Vieira · 1981
Synopsis
Twenty years of poems gathered in one volume: short, ironic pieces in which the archipelago is almost never named and in which, on the contrary, the books he has read keep returning: Borges, bestiaries, chess, biblical figures and philosophers. The tone is that of a man who mocks himself as much as the world, and several pieces take the form of an art of poetry turned against poetry.
Context
The book gathers poems that the author had scattered, since the early sixties, in the magazines of the archipelago and of emigration: Seló, the Cabo Verde bulletin, Vértice, Mákua, Alerta, Raízes. It appeared in 1981 from África Editora, in the Cântico Geral series, under a double address, Lisbon and Praia, six years after independence and twenty years after the oldest of these pieces.
Who it is for
A poetry of references, nourished by European and Latin American reading: the reading requires recognising them. In Portuguese, with no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first book, published when he was forty, and reissued in 1998. Critics see in it the start of a body of work written against the grain of insular regionalism.