The Daily Glance
Frederick Williams' Poets of Brazil/Poetas do Brazil is an anthology of Brazilian poetry from its beginnings to now. Because of its nature, I was predisposed to like it, for I'm very interested in Brazilian literature, and the few anthologies of Brazilian poetry available in English tend to focus on periods. This anthology definitely added to my knowledge of Brazilian poetry prior to the twentieth-century. In it I encountered many poets, especially from the colonial period, I did not know. It also includes some greats of the twentieth-century, like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Augusto de Campos, and I enjoyed getting to know a little more about Ferreira Gullar, whose poems in this anthology are fabulous. Of course, as with an anthology, many poets were missing that I would have liked to see included (I was especially sad not to see Leminski's work**), but that is part of the nature of anthologies. Williams' introduction was interesting, though I would have liked to see it much longer. The complexities of Brazilian poetry are not well-known in the U.S., so I appreciate seeing any explanatory material on it. Ultimately, this book makes a nice shelf companion to Bishop's anthology and Nothing the Sun could not Explain.
**Brazilian translators--please translate a selected works of Leminski's poetry in English. There's one in Spanish, and there are pieces of his scattered in multiple books.
Frederick Williams' Poets of Brazil/Poetas do Brazil is an anthology of Brazilian poetry from its beginnings to now. Because of its nature, I was predisposed to like it, for I'm very interested in Brazilian literature, and the few anthologies of Brazilian poetry available in English tend to focus on periods. This anthology definitely added to my knowledge of Brazilian poetry prior to the twentieth-century. In it I encountered many poets, especially from the colonial period, I did not know. It also includes some greats of the twentieth-century, like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Augusto de Campos, and I enjoyed getting to know a little more about Ferreira Gullar, whose poems in this anthology are fabulous. Of course, as with an anthology, many poets were missing that I would have liked to see included (I was especially sad not to see Leminski's work**), but that is part of the nature of anthologies. Williams' introduction was interesting, though I would have liked to see it much longer. The complexities of Brazilian poetry are not well-known in the U.S., so I appreciate seeing any explanatory material on it. Ultimately, this book makes a nice shelf companion to Bishop's anthology and Nothing the Sun could not Explain.
**Brazilian translators--please translate a selected works of Leminski's poetry in English. There's one in Spanish, and there are pieces of his scattered in multiple books.
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