Poetry
Ciclo do Cavalo
Not translated into English
António Ramos Rosa · 1975
Synopsis
Poems that seek to seize a horse through words: has anyone seen the horse, one of them asks, and the poet wants to learn it in a play of muscular words. The animal appears alone on the plain, before a mountain, a horse of earth, of speech and of fire; the poet calls himself a horse within the horse, because speech says him entire. His precision, says one line, is greater than the road, and he carries within him the whole breath of the house.
Context
The book appeared in Porto in 1975, in the series Os Olhos e a Memória, the same year as another collection, Animal Olhar, and was reissued in 2004. Its author was then fifty-one and had been publishing for seventeen years. In the 1960s, his poetry was close to that of Carlos de Oliveira or Gastão Cruz in its attention to the matter of the text; it later turned towards a voice that celebrates the sensuality of forms, those of a woman, a plant, water or a horse's flank.
Who it is for
A short collection, with no French translation. The same animal returns from poem to poem: the book reads poorly if one looks in it for an isolated piece.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the best books of one of the vastest and most significant poetic oeuvres in contemporary Portuguese poetry.
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