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Yesterday’s Dream
* pearls rolled the backs of geese, decorated nested wings. round pearls. clear. impossible. i stopped. rain did not. geese ruffled. pearls swept, seedling rain, planted in clouds. pearls bounced from nose to lip, to grass. pearls do not stay. greener places to see, to wet. hardly a soul by the river willing to feel how a river feels. except the woman. she smiled. we agreed the world was missing. i walked. a jewel of a time. i imagined dancing with you outside the sagging cabin. water. inside, outside the skin. i here, you there. i did not promise you tomorrow. i did not shake the words, forever. words surrounding…
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Rainbow Moon
14: a purple thistle sways in the heat a tide of granite inundates the valley wheels and wheels of stone encircle your musing body a small fire eats your dark thoughts jingle of bells cows and bulls trespass your prayers your smile cracks the stern boulder clouds open there is radiance in a mere glance your hands carry warm ashes of dark thoughts buried with the gentleness of slow gestures everything about you glows, eyes older than skin exquisite, twigs in the tiny stone circle speak a language i dare not ask
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Atlantis – sang by Nancy Dutra
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Da Costa makes sense of the world with his writing;
Ian Doig. Calgary Herald . Calgary, Alta.: Oct 19, 2003 . pg. F.4 Interview with paulo da costa Calgary writer paulo da costa was born in Angola and raised in Portugal, before coming to Canada in 1989. His first novel, The Scent of a Lie, was awarded the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book. Q: Why are you a writer? A: There’s two parts — to make sense of the world and to explore the different facets of life through different characters’ eyes. It’s like living different lives by entering other people’s perceptions and points of view. The other part…
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At Home in Two Cultures
A citizen of the world examines his multicultural identity paulo da costa, in conversation with Fernanda Viveiros In the words of Saint Augustine, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” It could be said that writer paulo da costa has read many pages since immigrating to Canada in the late 1980s. Born in Luanda, Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo has traveled throughout Europe and Brazil, lived in Calgary and on Cortes Island, and recently touched down in Silverton, a tiny hamlet in the Kootenay mountains. Now settled in Victoria, he is preparing to leave for a month-long stay in Portugal where…
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Canlit fabulism – Globe and Mail
Saturday, December 28, 2002 The Scent of a Lie By Paulo Da Costa With this book of linked stories, paulo da costa adds piquant new spice to the CanLit broth. Despite a recent Booker short list proving yet again that Canada’s writers are also the world’s, we’ve still lacked (I invite correction) a fiction hailing from Portuguese villages. Paying homage to a fabulist tradition running from Marquez and Borges and Carlos Fuentes all the way back to Cervantes, Da Costa evokes his God-beset, earthbound peasants, priests and villagers with palpable, redolent precision. Meanwhile, his setting in time remains indeterminate, suggesting a range that stretches across centuries, yet points unerringly to…
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New World Odour
Calgary writer paulo da costa’s short story collection The Scent of a Lie is the most uniformly fresh, sprightly, meaty work of Canadian fiction I’ve read in a long time. It came as a shock to me that the book had difficulty getting published. Now accumulating the attention it deserves, Da Costa’s book won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean Region)—as did similarly groundbreaking works such as Icefields by Thomas Wharton and Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto—and just this week it was awarded the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize. The linked collection of stories centres on the inhabitants of two small communities…
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L’odore della Menzogna – Gigliotti Giuseppina (Italian)
L’ODORE DELLA MENZOGNA paulo da costa traduttore – Gigliotti Giuseppina Non abbiamo mai avuto cattive intenzioni nei confronti di Camila Penca. Semplicemente pregavamo che al nostro villaggio fosse restituita l’antica pace e, grazie a Dio, Egli ha risposto alle nostre preghiere. Camila nacque in una famiglia perbene del nostro rispettabile villaggio, annidato sulla scarpata affilata come una zanna della Baia di Bocca dell’Inferno. Un villaggio ancora in piedi con orgoglio e resilienza dopo secoli di furia dell’Atlantico. Camila trascorse l’infanzia in un mondo tutto suo. S’arrampicava su e giù per la scarpata, raccogliendo piume di gabbiano, sguazzando nelle pozze della marea, strappando aculei ai ricci di mare, lei m’ama, lei…
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À Janela – fado and poems (bilingual)
This coffee table book celebrates Portuguese singers, from Mariza to Dulce Pontes, and contains a series of portrait paintings by Maria Miranda Lawrence accompanied by a selection of bilingual poetry which includes two excerpts from a poem: relinquishing the light by paulo da costa. This book is a gem with over fifty inspirational paintings and poems. Twelve talented singers are featured in paintings “À Janela” – the Portuguese phrase for – at or by the window.These singers represent Portuguese music from rural folk to urban Fado.The association with the window is used as a metaphor to express the various moods and contrasts of life. There are many references to the…
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Ellipse – Translations
ellipse magazine in their issue n. 84-85 has just published a feature of Contemporary Brazilian Writing in Translation. You can find paulo da costa’s translations of Reynaldo Valinho Alvarez and Moacyr Scliar in this issue.
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Tricked by the dusk – Toronto Star
From Cowtown to Portugal, with love Spare, poetic tales of ordinary people Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a windblown modern city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a young Angola-born man sat down to tell wonderful, enchanting stories set in lands far, far away. These are stories about people and lives far removed from our contemporary bustle, but the emotional and imaginative truths they portray resonate long after the pages have been turned. The Scent Of A Lie, a collection of 14 related short stories by Calgary writer and editor Paulo da Costa, marks the debut of a remarkable writer. Artists in any…
