São Tomé and Príncipe / All works
Poetry
Alto como o silêncio
Not translated into English
Manuela Margarido · 1957
Synopsis
The collection brings together untitled poems, simply numbered, in a lyrical and inward vein. The poet speaks in them of anguish, melancholy, loss and the passing of time, of solitude too, “Só árvores / estão comigo”, but also of war, “a letter that all read / and that few understand”, with at moments a glimmer of hope. She herself said of these poems that they were in reality European, born of her life in Portugal.
Context
Published in Lisbon in 1957 by Publicações Europa-América, it is the author's first and only complete collection. Inocência Mata sees in it a book of restrained silences, of interiorisation and contemplation, and Luciana Brandão Leal and Fernanda Oliveira da Silva read in it an individual suffering, from which her poetry would later move on to collective resistance and to the denunciation of labour on the plantations. Jessica Falconi compares the work with that of the poet Conceição Lima.
Who it is for
For discovering the intimate poetry of a São Toméan author of the independence generation, written in Lisbon.
Prizes and reception
According to Leal and Silva, the title reads as a paradox: what is felt without being able to be said.
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