Entre luzes e sombras da pandemia

Abstract

Estevam Matiazzi’s poetics are memorably reflected in the title of his colorful poem collection, most of which are written in poetic prose, with singular didacticism. “Life Seen Through Windows: before and beyond them” is a work marked by movements and approaches in a mutating world view, that established relations with its time. ‘Drunken times’, actually, pandemic times, Covid-19 times. In a cathartic process, the poetic persona gazes outside his window, a narrow spaces’ view that creates an egregore of love. Engaged in the notion of roughness within the historical moment, he creates poems, comforting hearts in distress and full of uncertainties. The title has a direct connection with the works’ poetry; it brings relations in constant change, a shape still undetermined, a state beyond any mold, any casted matter. Beyond anything pre-fixed, anything pre-established. Thus, in a language of light and shadows, “Life Seen Through Windows: before and beyond them” is a beacon in the darkness of these pandemic times (Márcia Lembrança). Life Seen Through Windows – behind and in front of them are 40 poems from quarantine, written in 2020, in the context of Covid-19 pandemic. The view from the windows in the apartment where I live in Belo Horizonte, side by side with the song “Window’s Scenery” – written by Lô Borges and Fernando Brant for the album Corner Club, released in 1972, year in which I was born –, are the inspiration for these poems. Nearly 50 years after this masterpiece, between the slot that remains between buildings, I watch, beyond the windows, the mountain ranges that still encircle the capitol of Minas Gerais, either under blue, open skies or under thick grey clouds… From behind windows, I listen to radios, watch screens and see continued ailments; deforested, burned Amazon, slighted traditional cultures; inflation on the rise, democracy under threat; drama and mire, plots and fire…