The Mystical Rose

Selected Poems

Adélia Prado

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780372419
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Adelia Prado was 'discovered' when she was nearly 40 by Brazil's foremost modern poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who was astonished to read her 'phenomenal' poems, launching her literary career with his announcement that St Francis was dictating verses to a housewife in the provincial backwater of Minas Gerais. Psychiatrists in droves made the pilgrimage to Divinópolis to delve into the psyche of this devout Catholic who wrote startlingly pungent poems of and from the body; they were politely served coffee and sent back to the city. After publishing her first collection, Baggage, in 1976, she went on to become one of Brazil's best-loved poets, awarded the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. Adelia Prado's poetry combines passion and intelligence, wit and instinct. Her poems are about human concerns, especially those of women, about living in one's body and out of it, about the physical but also the spiritual and the imaginative life; about living in two worlds simultaneously: the spiritual and the material. She also writes about ordinary matters, insisting that the human experience is both mystical and carnal. For her these are not contradictory: 'It's the soul that's erotic, ' she writes. 'Sometimes other poets and criti analyse my writing, and they've said how, even though the text is made of colloquial and everyday language, the work goes to transcendental issues. I don't know, I don't explain things; I simply do what I do. I only know how to write about concrete, immediate and commonplace things. But these commonplace things show me their metaphysical nature. I can only see the metaphysical, the divine, through the concrete and the human.' 'Brazil has produced what might seem impossible: a really sexy, mystical, Catholic poet' - Robert Hass.

FROM

The Pelican

(1987)

It is good for me that I have been afflicted.

PSALMS 119: 71

Fibrillations

Funeral or feast

no matter which

everything beating inside me

is desire.

O heart that never tires of the resonance of things,

I love, love you, love you,

sad as you are, O world,

O man so handsome that I’m paralysed.

I love you, I love you.

And with only one tongue,

one sense of pitch, imperfect.

I love you.

There’s a certain wild herb with jagged

fuzzy leaves –

I love you, I say, desperate

for a different word to come to my aid.

To the trembling grasses,

love is a breeze.

Lily-like

Lilies, lilies,

life is all mystery.

I ruin the lilies,

they confuse me.

They blanket the departed,

heaven’s flowerbeds

where virgins stroll.

Like heads of garlic,

their bulbs sit beneath the ground

waiting for November to make me suffer.

They grow thick, like people:

Easter lily, water lily, purple lily,

yellow lily – anti-lily –

lily of nothing, spirit of flower,

floral breath of the world,

unfinished thought of God

on this October afternoon I ask myself:

What are lilies for

but to torment me?

A black lily is impossible.

Innocent and voracious, lilies don’t exist

and all this talk is delirium.

The Mystical Rose

The first time

I was conscious of form,

I said to my mother:

‘Dona Armanda has a basket in her kitchen

where she keeps tomatoes and onions’

and so began fretting that even lovely things

don’t last forever,

until one day I wrote:

‘It was here in this room that my father died,

here that he wound the clock

and rested his elbows

on what he thought was a windowsill

but was the threshold of death.’

I saw that words grouped a certain way

made it possible to live without

the things they described,

my father was coming back, indestructible.

It was as if someone painted a picture

of Dona Armanda’s basket and said:

‘Now you can eat the fruit.’

There was order in the world

– where did it come from?

And why does order – which is joy itself,

and bathes in a different light

than the light of day –

make the soul sad?

We must protect the world

from time’s corrosion, we must cheat time itself.

And so I kept writing:

‘It was here in this room that my father died…

O Night, come on down,

your blackness can’t erase this memory.’

That was my first poem.

The Sphinx

Ofélia’s hair is as black

as the day she got married.

She has nine sons, minus the one

who’s a homosexual

and another who’s into d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction by ELLEN DORE WATSON
• Acknowledgements
• from BAGGAGE (1976)
• from THE HEADLONG HEART (1978)
• from LAND OF THE HOLY CROSS (1981)
• from THE PELICAN (1987)
• from KNIFE IN THE CHEST (1988)
• from ORACLES OF MAY (1999)
• About the Author
• Copyright