Irene Marques on Beyond Bullfights & Ice Hockey (essays) Paulo da Costa has a poetic and lyrical voice that is beautiful. It is an appeasing murmur conducive to meditation putting into…
Cara A, Monte das Lameiras, pátio três semanas A manhã desperta e suspira nos pulmões dos pássaros. Inauguro o dia nos degraus da entrada, roupão de banho vestido e…
CLASS STRUGGLE translated by paulo da costa Not everyone who built the cathedrals witnessed the same. Some, by sunlight, erected towers and pinnacles and attained heaven, others, inside crypts,…
The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories is a collection of sudden fiction (less than 1,000 words each) that compresses its narrative to deliver a variety of stories that alternate the flavour of a philosophical reflection with the whimsical enchantment of a fable with a twist. The characters emerge from worlds of human domesticity and community interaction as well as from the natural world, lending voice to experiences that, at times, occur outside the accepted norms of consensual reality.
“In any skin purple is a heavy tone that penetrates to the core.”
paulo da costa’s stories get under your skin, bruise your consciousness with their exploration of the forces that hold us together, not always benignly, and those that pull us apart. A hunter and a cougar ponder the positions of predator and prey under the dense canopy of a West Coast forest. A nine-year-old girl tells her stuffed rabbit, Carrot, that it’s not as easy to run away as she thought, especially when she suspects someone is following her. Like the bubbles that the character in the title story blows while witnessing the dissolution of a love affair, these stories dazzle and beguile with their craft, their often dark humour, their grasp of people living the extremity that is daily life.
The Scent of a Lie is a book of fourteen inter-connected stories, set in two charismatic towns in Portugal. Characters weave in and out of the intertwined stories, which can be read as a novel in fragments.
This bilingual anthology of fifty one poems selected from Júdice’s extensive poetic opus covers the years of 1967 to 2005 and contains the original Portuguese poems face à face with their English translations. Although his works have been translated into twelve languages in twenty countries, Júdice’s poetry is underrepresented in the English language. At present, this anthology stands as the only book of his poetry available in the English language.
The extended, contemplative tone in many of Júdice’s poems, his unhurried meditation on the subject at hand will appeal to the reader who seeks refuge from the present day diet of fast-food culture.
Judice’s poetry is a welcome counterpoint to the hurried existence of our modern lives. In this collection of bilingual poems the reader will find words that slowly melt into the page as though he or she contemplated an unhurried winter icicle melt from the eaves or the heavens, departing one form to embody another, before dropping into the reader’s mind to moisten a new consciousness and renewed understanding of being.
Pé D’Orelha (2012) Amazon Language: English/ Portuguese
O Perfume da Mentira é um livro de catorze contos interligados que se desenrolam em duas aldeias carismáticas de Portugal e podendo mesmo ser lido como um romance em retalhos.
Da reinterpretação mitológica patente no poema “édipo antes de édipo?” ao poema de pendor autobiográfico “gelo canadiano”, das paisagens intimistas de “tão longe, tão perto” à crítica de costumes de “peregrinação”, da composição quase cinematográfica da sequência dos três poemas que compõem “lua rainbow” à brevidade sentenciosa e auto-reflexiva de poemas como “primeira impressão”, o universo poético de paulo da costa parece deslocar-se permanentemente por entre um sem número de impressões onde poderemos ver, se assim o entendermos e soubermos, um igual sem número de notas de rodapé em relação a esse grande e indecifrável texto que é a vida.
