The poetry of Pedro da Silveira: a panoramic reading (*)

Primeira Voz (first voice) collection and signals a territorial limit ("The land ends here" ) does not refer exclusively to literal geography. I believe that the island space, with its delimited borders, surrounded by sea and wind, or eternity, serves as a lever for reflection on another territory, which is that of poetry and its vocation to search for belonging that cannot be found either in the original place from whichit is launched or in any other place to which it goes. I would say that the subject of Silveira's poetics knows that the dichotomy between leaving and arriving is an insufficient solution for the meaning of a poem, which necessarily escapes the categories of perception we have of reality. A poem is a place adrift, whose adherence to historical or social assumptions is always slippery. The nonsense characterizes it - the act of saying that constitutes it inevitablydeviates from the route of what it wants to say. Nothing is new here: all literature is an act of transfiguration, of recognizing a world that has become detached from its referents and no longer belongs to them.

This may seem strange in a work that has often protested against its attachment to the ethereal and the abstract, whose concrete marks run through its sixty years of construction. A minimally attentive reading of Fui ao mar buscar laranjas (Went to the sea to pick oranges- the entire collection of Pedro da Silveira's poetry) will necessarily find traces of the particular history of Azorean life. Between Primeira Voz (First Voice) and A Ilha e o Mundo (The Island and the World), the imagery almost always revolves around ideas of passage and isolation, manifested by elements such as ports, quays, boats, steamers, and handkerchiefs, linked, of course, to the migratory movements that characterized the history of the islands in the 20th century. In this sense, the poems are woven around the throbbing awareness of the material conditions of the place from which they set out and replicate the departure movement. Were talking about the themes of poverty, smallness, being condemned at birth to an existence exiled from the world, and, undoubtedly, membership of a shared history: “(our eternal history of renouncing life, / waiting for heaven), / black history that the old people brought / from the old people of yesteryear.” So, on the one hand, theres the umbilical relationship with ancestry, and on the other, the knowledge that this is linked to a universal framework. Its the poem “That My Grandparents Left Me “and the poem “The Tears of All Famines” (idem). In addition, there are the doldrums, the monotony, the passivity of daily life on the island and the rituals that operate within it, the stories of the older people, the trivial conversations, the places where those who remain to socialize, perpetuating a marginalized existence that is alien to the places where so many others have left without returning. As a reader, I'm less interested in these marks of historicity and more in the way they are transported, like motors, to Pedro da Silveiras poetic creation because it is there that a world of atomized existence is structured. After all, history gives place and voice to its spectral tenants and revitalizes them. Silveira says, at the start of Sinais de Oeste, in “Poetic Art”:

Now, this is my rationale, my science:

The true horizon is that of water and sky.

With the sea around the land senses, is lively, awakens from being land. (...)

- And our blood navigates us, pushes us to where it resides ( dreamed or real) within us, the Hereafter.

The soft, dragging landscape is resurrected through the poem, made up of a desire to cross the historical horizon of no future. In it, the living and the dead mingle without dispute and head for another pier, a moveable pier where I glimpse the correspondence with “the gesture of invention.” The poem is no longer fixed anywhere: itaddresses the Azorean islands, the “California’s lost in abundance.” Macau, in a text dedicated to Camões, reflects when it says that "your destiny, according to the law of the gods, is to sing as the days die among trees with impossible branches.” The poems universe is no longer one we can call true or strive for truth. Its intention is not to pass itself off as historical or sociological catechesis nor as an elegy for the messianic islands. On the contrary, it is to build a place that escapes its condition, that points to a destiny made from the deception of all places. In other words, to set off towards a geography that can never be reached, except by mistake.

Silveiras poetry also does not stray so far from the abstract and the ethereal, although it sometimes communicates this intention. Its much more about escaping the formula, the “sexual verses” and the docile to build a poem that is a natural song of open space, unsubmissive to academic schools and practices; what I see in Pedro da Silveiras poetry that can correspond with island works of literature, whether Azorean or otherwise, is the fusion between place, biographical and historical subject - geography as an internal constituent of the individual -visible in constituent of the individual -visible in a “Sonnet of identity”,where, through the signs of stone, woods, and hardness, he reinforces his indomesticable nature, whose homeland and destiny are uncertain and indefinable. In the text with which his collected poetry ends, we first witness the disappearance of the omnipresent maritime element, only to see it transformed, “no longer blue serenity, but crisp or rebellious lead-green” Is this the passage of time, the confrontation with Death? The slow metamorphosis of meaning in any poem that can even be called that. The continuous search for the ultimate pier?

The unmistakable timbre of this writing is the search for poetry, where we know that “there is no poetry” And it is on the search for their voice or the whereabouts of the subject that embodies it that these poems are almost always built and launched towards a shifting and unstable destiny, from which nothing more can be expected than the oblivion of which all mortals will be reluctant prisoners, sooner or later, celebrated.

Leonardo Sousa. Poet