Overview

"Excerpted from the award statement by ANTÓNIO RAMOS ROSA NATIONAL POETRY AWARD júri minute (José Tolentino Mendonça, Nuno Júdice, Adriana Freire Nogueira) City of Faro, July, 26. 2017: ""For its thematic coherence, linked to the theme of the voyage, for the originality of a universe that is not limited to description, Mediterranean captures, in each poem, the essential details in which European history and culture are projected. This is a book where the South appears represented in all that the Mediterranean means in our culture. Greco-Latin antiquity is transported to the present, crossed with the Judeo-Christian matrix. Mediterranean is a book that presents us with a poetry that reflects our cultural roots as living elements of our daily lives.This is a remarkable book by João Luís Barreto Guimarães, celebrating the encounter of his poetics with this world of memories, correspondences and voices."""

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Reviews

"""I love the deep attentiveness to the world in these poems. But even more so: I love how this attentiveness is handed to us with language that is graceful rather than heavy or full of pronouncements; there is play and there is much reality, and all of it is filled with metaphysics but not weighted down by it. It is like classical music, in this effect. And, I love that. I know I will be looking to read new translations of these writings anywhere I can find them. Truly."" ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic ""What takes a Mediterranean poet on a meditative journey across the Mediterranean, from Bridal Veil in Porto Moniz, to the Wall of Solomon, to ruins of a Roman palace in Split, to a flower market in Provence...? It reminds us of a familiar expression: ""If you lose your way, go back to where you started!"" This is exactly what I think makes João Luís Barreto Guimarães's adventure unique: he reflects the modern consciousness onto the face of our history of civilization ""where time itself is holding its breath."" The poetry in Mediterranean reflects about what we have lost and are losing every day, mastering questions and revelations that, articulated in the right place and the right moment, with such a poetic finesse as here, stays with us much longer after the Mediterranean scent is gone."" LULJETA LLESHANAKU, author of Negative Space ""This is, above all, the aestheticization of everyday, colloquial language, and its hybridization with references to high culture, a fine and well-balanced irony, with a subtle humorous edge. The lightness and warmth of a lyrical smile that sometimes spills over into the laughter of lovers and, on other occasions, into that of an observer of a banal street event, but which never turns into a noisy and strident laugh. (...) Guimarães' work is also one of the proofs that Portuguese poetry is still alive and vital, and that it is not reduced to the beautiful hundred-headed hydra, now iconic, that is Pessoa."" MARKO POGAČAR, author of Dear Letter Office"

Author Information

João Luís Barreto Guimarães was born in Porto, Portugal in 1967, where he trained in medicine. He is a poet and translator (as well as a reconstructive surgeon). He teaches poetry to ICBAS Medical Students, at University of Porto. As a writer, he is the author of eleven poetry books since 1989, collected twice, including his first seven books in Collected Poetry (2011); the subsequent You Are Here (2013), published also in Italy; Mediterranean (2016) chosen as National Award António Ramos Rosa and published in Spain, France, Poland, Egypt, Greece, Serbia, and Italy where it was finalist to Camaiori International Prize 2018; Nomad (2018) chosen as Bertrand Poetry Book of the Year 2018 and recipient of the Armando da Silva Carvalho Literary Prize, also published in Spain, Czechia, Egypt and Italy where it was also finalist to the Camaiori International Prize 2019; the anthology Time Advances by Syllables (2019), published also in Croatia, Macedonia and Brazil; and Movement (2020), recipient of the Grand Prix of Literature DST, also published in Macedonia. Mediterranean, translated to English by Calvin Olsen, won the Willow Run Poetry Book Award 2020. Calvin Olsen is an American poet and translator based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where he studied under Robert Pinsky, David Ferry, and Nobel laureate Louise Glück, and an MA in English & Comparative Literature from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and he is currently a doctoral candidate in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media at NC State University. Calvin's poetry and translations have appeared in The Adroit Journal, AGNI, Asymptote, The London Magazine, The National Poetry Review, and World Literature Today, among many others, and he is the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and a 2021 Travel Fellowship from The American Literary Translators Association. More of his work can be found at calvin-olsen.com.

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