The Mystical Rose

Adélia Prado author Ellen Watson translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Published:7th Nov '14

Should be back in stock very soon

The Mystical Rose cover

Adelia Prado was "discovered" 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 Divinopolis 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 critics 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.'

'The life captured in Prado's poems is convulsive: from a dark corner of despair she can rocket to pure joy in one line. All the contradictions, paradoxes, and dualities of our lives thrive here. This is poetry at its hottest and most naked, beautiful poetry of the body and soul' - James Tate. 'Adelia Prado's most recent collection of poems, once more in Ellen Dore Watson's superbly energetic and natural English, is nothing like any poetry I know in our present moment. Her humour, her dancing solidity, her joy in being alive - I think back to Chaucer, and the poems of Grace Paley. Prado is similarly voluble, playful, down to earth, and cheerful; and she seems to have an uncannily easy-going, even merry relationship with God and all his family. She has given us a perfectly crystalline ex-voto' - Jean Valentine. 'A major poet of the Americas. In Watson's hands, Prado's work arrives in English as if it had never left Portuguese. I send - bouquets of gratitude' - Carolyn Forche. 'Adelia Prado's poetry is a poetry of abundance. These poems overflow with the humble, grand, various stuff of daily life - necklaces, bicycles, fish; saints and prostitutes and presidents; innumerable chickens and musical instruments - And, seemingly at every turn, there is food' - Ellen Dore Watson.

ISBN: 9781780372402

Dimensions: 216mm x 138mm x 10mm

Weight: unknown

160 pages

International