Ricardo Marques

Ricardo Marques’ poetry is distinguished instead by the elegance of its phrasing and by the concentration of thought it contains. One is aware, reading it, of a mind that is, by its nature, philosophical but, at the same time, committed to personal, sensuous experience. His poetry too can express a post-religious aesthetic – “the way the sensuality/ of a twisted languid body/ receives our gaze’s forgiveness” (translated by Richard Price with Carla Davidson) but it can also suggest the mythic:

The repetition of days
is like an early morning
in which we love each other
in the sheets of the world – (translated by Jane McKie with Carla Davidson)

For Marques, “Poetry is crucially a crucible: an experience of the world and a mirror. My poetry is a reflection on the past, present and future, three wor(l)ds we were given and we need to digest.”

Tom Pow
Glasgow Review of Books
https://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2018...