Goodreads reviewer below quotes Fernando Pessoa...paying homage, epressing affinity. The poem quoted below is lovely.
Sidharth Vardhan rated it
Best book I have read this year. Pessoa is the best poet in the world. The number of characters allowed for goodreads reviews are too few to share all the poems i want to, so here are just a couple:
"Better the flight of the bird that passes and leaves no trace
Than the passage of the animal, recorded in the ground.
The bird passes and is forgotten, which is how it should be.
The animal, no longer there and so of no further use,
Uselessly shows it was there.
Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature isn’t Nature.
What was is nothing, and to remember is not to see.
Pass by, bird, pass, and teach me to pass!"
"A row of trees in the distance, toward the slope...
But what is a row of trees? There are just trees.
“Row” and the plural “trees” are names, not things.
Unhappy human beings, who put everything in order,
Draw lines from thing to thing,
Place labels with names on absolutely real trees,
And plot parallels of latitude and longitude
On the innocent earth itself, which is so much greener and full
of flowers!"
"In this way or that way,
As it may happen or not happen,
Sometimes succeeding in saying what
I think And at other times saying it badly and with things mixed in,
I keep writing my poems, inadvertently,
As if writing were not something requiring action,
As if writing were something that happens to me
In the same way that the sun reaches me from outside.
I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won’t need a corridor Of thought leading to words.
I don’t always manage to feel what I know I should feel.
Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river,
Weighed down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.
I try to shed what I’ve learned, I try to forget the way I was taught to remember,
To scrape off the paint that was painted on my senses,
To uncrate my true emotions,
To step out of all my wrapping and be myself—not Alberto
Caeiro
But a human animal created by Nature."
"Better the flight of the bird that passes and leaves no trace
Than the passage of the animal, recorded in the ground.
The bird passes and is forgotten, which is how it should be.
The animal, no longer there and so of no further use,
Uselessly shows it was there.
Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature isn’t Nature.
What was is nothing, and to remember is not to see.
Pass by, bird, pass, and teach me to pass!"
"A row of trees in the distance, toward the slope...
But what is a row of trees? There are just trees.
“Row” and the plural “trees” are names, not things.
Unhappy human beings, who put everything in order,
Draw lines from thing to thing,
Place labels with names on absolutely real trees,
And plot parallels of latitude and longitude
On the innocent earth itself, which is so much greener and full
of flowers!"
"In this way or that way,
As it may happen or not happen,
Sometimes succeeding in saying what
I think And at other times saying it badly and with things mixed in,
I keep writing my poems, inadvertently,
As if writing were not something requiring action,
As if writing were something that happens to me
In the same way that the sun reaches me from outside.
I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won’t need a corridor Of thought leading to words.
I don’t always manage to feel what I know I should feel.
Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river,
Weighed down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.
I try to shed what I’ve learned, I try to forget the way I was taught to remember,
To scrape off the paint that was painted on my senses,
To uncrate my true emotions,
To step out of all my wrapping and be myself—not Alberto
Caeiro
But a human animal created by Nature."
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
by
