Poesia Reunida by Manuel Resende

Abstract

Reviews 297 Manuel Resende, Poesia Reunida, 2nd impression (Lisbon: Cotovia, 2020). 280 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ricardo Vasconcelos (San Diego State University, CA) Manuel Resende’s Poesia Reunida, published by Cotovia in April 2018, and already in a second impression in February 2020, features the author’s previously releasedNaturezaMortacomDesodorizante[Stilllifewithdeodorant](Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1983), Em Qualquer Lugar [Anywhere] (& Etc, 1998), and O Mundo Clamoroso, Ainda [The clamorous world, still] (Angelus Novus, 2004). Three other sections are added, namely ‘E Mais... (Inéditos e Esparsos)’ [And more... Unpublished and Uncollected], the poetry written under the heteronym of Mika Ahtsihaari, and an interesting hors texte with the title ‘Ar de Cura’ — a title literally meaning ‘looking like a cure’, but also a word play on the Portuguese saying ‘o que arde cura’, literally ‘what burns you will heal you’. The volume also includes an important study on Manuel Resende’s poetry by Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre, titled ‘A R(e)alidade e as Cerejas’. It could hardly be said of a poet who has released three books of original work with the distinguished publishing house Cotovia that he is nearly unknown. However, it would seem undeniable that Manuel Resende (1948–2020) came surprisingly close to that situation. Indeed Resende remained on the very fringes of the Portuguese literary field as a poet, despite being well respected for his work as a literary translator of modern Greek and German. As sometimes also happens in the dynamics of the literary field, his rarefied presence also led some to evoke the excellence of his poetry, though; fellow poet, friend and, for a while, co-worker at the Jornal de Notícias, Manuel António Pina, for example, recurrently praised Resende’s poems, no matter that they were almost always out of circulation. It would be easy to say that Resende’s work was little noticed due to the distraction of critics, or at the very least to a lack of effort to recognize authors that do not gain momentum. And perhaps there is something true in that idea, since we find barely any scholarship whatsoever on books that were indeed published, even if they soon stopped circulating. However, it is more plausible to say that Manuel Resende made a conscious decision to circulate himself very little in the vanity fair of the literary world, and also paid a price for living outside Portugal, for decades, as a translator for the European Union. Be that as it may, Manuel Resende developed a coherent oeuvre over the course of several decades, one that is all the more disconcerting to come across given how outstandingly mature and original it is. When Poesia Reunida was released in 2018, in an interview given to Isabel Lucas for the newspaper Público, Resende said, regarding the essential elements of life that find their way into his poetic discourse, that ‘A poesia é muita rara para ser desperdiçada com porcarias. Essas coisas são o amor, a liberdade...’ [Poetry is too rare to be wasted on junk. Those things are love, freedom...], Reviews 298 not really adding much more to that list of essentials. Of course, the passage recognizes the value of these things that matter the most in our lives. But it is worth noting the first part of the author’s statement, claiming that ‘Poetry is rare’, because this idea is eloquently reflected in the author’s own production. According to this view, poetry as a synonym of high-quality writing is rarely achieved, and Manuel Resende seems to have been in no rush to compose a vast amount of works, rather being more inclined to preserve a small but highly significant collection of poetry. His Poesia Reunida fully matches that description. For all purposes, this is twice a volume of collected poetry, since the various books were already collections of texts written with great temporal distance between them. Fifteen years elapsed between the first and the second book, six years more between the second and the third, and another fourteen years between the third book and this Poesia Reunida, which includes previously unpublished poems. The long periods of time that elapsed between each book and the actual texts both...