IWA Bogdani published “MORNING SEED” MARIA DO SAMEIRO BARROSO

IWA Bogdani has published the new book of Maria do Samiero Barroso “Morning seed”.

“Amantes da Neblina” (Lovers of the Mist) by Maria do Sameiro Barroso

The Spirals of a Major Poetry

This book offers major and mature poetry of cosmic breath also anchored in the here and now, filtered by the music and the flow of images, impregnated with emotion and also rationality, sprinkled with cultured references but with no excess of erudition, presenting an attentive and refined look at the human condition at the brims of risk and adventure of living. The world of the Greek culture is called up as scenery and metaphor, as well as the spaces of Archeology, Medicine, and the vigorous chants of other poets. In that same “mist” – which is not synonymous with diffuse or vague, but a mantle of beauty that involves the subjects of writing and reading – poetry is assumed as love for the world, a place of beauty and creation. We appraise a continuous search for the origins, from the most remote to the incidences of everyday life, but not as trivial and as a useless banality and useless repetition. There is also a certain dramatism, palpable in the contrasts, in the antitheses, in the oxymorons. The construction of the poems is accurate: the images, the affections, the exterior landscapes and the interior landscape are set in motion at the very beginning of the line of the verse, the rhythm and the cadence being speeded up like the musical pieces, especially of Wagner, evoked in the poems. Everything undergoes a spiralling crescendo, irresistibly dragging all the “materials” in which poems originated, almost in a vortex up to a higher intensity. The effect, however, is beyond being catastrophic before the final gathering of the sought and reached materials. The movements are not changed in na interweaved polyphony, growing like a semantic discharge like the lava of a volcano. Empedocles (throwing himself into a volcano) is not alluded to by chance, in that transmutative passage which, instead of destroying, purifies, renews and restores. This intensification of meaning decreases towards the end of the poem, leaving a suspended image or a phrase as visible signs of quietness or return to the initial outset serenely after everything has been transmuted. This composition style is original, carrying echoes of other modern poets of various nationalities, or even from the Classical Antiquity. This way of intertwining other voices adds even more value to this poetry, which is somehow assumed as continuity and homage to those that had preceded it, hence ennobling the multiple fabric of which it is made.

(…) All the spirals ascend and calm down, recognizing the fundamental role of poetry in the knowledge of oneself and the world when facing the challenges of life and the inevitability of death. This mature poetry, filled with epiphanies, is genesiac and oniric, driving back any fugue point to the most palpable reality. Like an enchanting song, Os Amantes da Neblina (Lovers of the Mist) capture the reading that thickens and vibrates, pointing the trail of a “first time” — just like all Work of Art. Maria Teresa Dias Furtado

Professor of German Literature Excerpts from the Preface of the book published in 2007.

Maria do Sameiro Barroso belongs to that group of elected people who usually arrive far ahead of their time, making their way outside the norms, mentalities, and fashions. Obviously, only these people can really transform their world. She is a very original and unique voice; she is one of those people of great talent who bring and anticipate the future. Heiress of the great poetic lines of our literature, skilled in Germanic literature, the author knows how to assert herself through the domain of her writing, mastering her own rhythm through the subtlety of her restlessness, standing out as a leading voice in the contemporary Portuguese literature. The poetic expression, the meaning of the sea, the magic, the feminine world, the lyrical wandering, the feeling of the religious (in the sense of re-connecting), the fantastic, the prophetic, which are characteristics of great Portuguese literature, reach, in the various books of Maria do Sameiro Barroso, a new breath and quite special meaning.

Fernando Dacosta
Writer and journalist, 1999.