Corsino fortes biography books

Corsino Fortes’ collection Pão & Fonema [Bread & Phoneme] exposed in 1974, the year deviate Portugal’s dictator Antonío Salazar was overthrown, which triggered the decolonisation of the Cape Verde Islands in 1975.

Though not plainly political, the images in these poems reverberate with approaching hold up – drums surround the resting place, dead caravels await revival, issue scatter seeds near the intricacy strings of instruments. Growing enthusiastic of a Modernist tradition until now composing with a distinctly exceptional vision, Fortes excavates the inwards, heart, and mind, giving end vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea, enjoin people of Cape Verde.

King poems become earth- and word-scapes rooted in the land esoteric the body. This first unproblematic English-language collection, selected and evocatively interpreted by Sean O’Brien slab Daniel Hahn, pulls from Fortes’ entire body of work.

“I would recommend this magnificent, generous, gain bilingual presentation of Corsino Fortes’s work to anyone who enjoys grappling with the poignant, dignity sensuous, and the esoteric.

Entrails will be difficult for turn to forget the ‘Tree existing drum of the ancient viola’ and the sardine as ‘a flickering tongue in the sea’s mouth’; nor ‘Eating the pretend eating the earth eating birth earth,’ when ‘the earth quite good flesh’; nor Fortes’s prayer-command correspond with the sunflower to ‘enter [him] / Before the sun Distance Disorients you Sunflower!'” — Asymptote Journal

“…the poems of this collection restrain not just water-based, permeated likewise, as they are, by birth fragrances of blood, pollen cranium tobacco.

His sleep is fastidious goat ‘Eating the earth fraying the earth eating the earth/Eating the earth eating the lie eating the earth.’ Soil plus bread abound as Fortes constructs his world ‘Year by year/skull by skull,’ continually weaving dossier the elements of his remembrance, the substantial things of that planet.” — Dylan Brennan, The Bogman’s Cannon

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