Reviews 294 Lopes sums it all up quite well in ‘Poetisa-Fêmea, Poeta-Macho’ (cliché em papel couché): ‘Sou um poeta-macho | tenho um gabinete | sou uma poetisa fêmea | escrevo na retrete | Sou um poeta-macho | sou um badalo | sou uma poetisaf êmea | calo-me’ [I am a male-poet | I have an office | I am a female poet | I write in the toilets | I am a male poet | I am a clapper | I am a female poet | I shut up]. Manuel de Freitas, Ubi Sunt, with an afterword by Mariano Marovatto (Juiz de Fora, MG: Macondo, 2019). 92 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ida Alves (Universidade Federal Fluminense, RJ) Ubi Sunt, by the contemporary Portuguese poet Manuel de Freitas, now in a Brazilian edition, brings together forty-one poems in three sections: ‘HIC’, ‘ET NUNC’, ‘ET SEMPER’. In the prose poem ‘Comovidos a Oeste’ [Moved to the West] (p. 37), we find: ‘The fundamental usefulness of poetry is, for me, its vocation to approximate people and dilute false borders. Everything else — don’t get me wrong — is only history of literature.’ The two verbs, approximate and dilute, may indicate two significant axes in the work of this poet, critic, editor, and translator, who has been, since the end of the 1990s, one of the most interesting poetic and critical voices in Portugal. Over the years, Manuel de Freitas has published anthologies with other poets and more than four dozen poetry books, as well as literary criticism and translations. He is the editor of two valuable magazines on poetry/critique, Telhados de Vidro and Cão Celeste, and a poet with a keen perspective on current literature, on Portuguese culture and on European urban reality which, due to the forces of globalization, can be experienced anywhere. Though relatively well known in Brazil, especially in the Rio de Janeiro/ São Paulo circuit, to those who are interested in recent poetry and that follow attentively what is being done abroad, his work in that country was previously limited to two brief anthologies of his poetry: the first one published in 2007 (by Oficina Raquel, Rio de Janeiro) and the second, seven years later (in the Ciranda da Poesia Collection of the publishing house of Rio de Janeiro University — EdUERJ), both organized by Luis Maffei. Therefore, this is the first time that a complete book by Manuel de Freitas has been edited among us: Ubi Sunt, whose original edition came out in Lisbon, in 2014. Published in Brazil by a recently established contemporary poetry publisher, Macondo, based in the city of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state, this book is the first volume of A Colecção, a fivebook collection of contemporary Portuguese poetry. The idea defended by the editors is to invite ‘their readers to get to know new affective, political and poetic geographies. Books that are like homes. Books that grow like trees’, provoking the friction of the poetic Portuguese language (note the non-Brazilian spelling ‘colecção’). The work of this Brazilian publisher is similar to that of Manuel de Freitas’s own publishing house, Averno, which publishes mainly lesser-known poets in small format books of less than 100 pages, equally small circulation, Reviews 295 and discreet or artisanal graphic design, taking into consideration the editorial reality of poetry not having an abundant audience. At the end, the Macondo edition carries an afterword written in fragments by Mariano Marovatto (a young composer, singer, guitarist and poet) dwelling on Manuel de Freitas and the ‘feasible disenchantment of Lisbon’ (p. 83), with the appreciation of the reader as ‘dysphoric accomplice’ (p. 85). But let us go back to the verbs approximate and dilute. In Ubi Sunt, prose poems are predominant, and they approximate, by affection and by the irremediable presence of death, the people who marked the poet’s paths in the past and present, places in his life, such as Santarém, Coimbra and Lisbon, with their streets and corners, and human-sized trading: taverns, alehouses, cafes, small bookstores, record stores. With wandering eyes, the lyrical subject evokes reading friends, ordinary people like employees or tavern and café owners, his woman accomplice of so many common projects, In...
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Oct 1, 2022
Débora Luciene Porto Boenavides 
Open Access
