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.”
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...