Here is a lucid, forthright poet charmed by the paradoxes of each poem, by the tiny gestures and traces of life faceted within each poem, and by the vocation of poetry itself.
— Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Poems of effervescent grace from one of the best-known and best-loved poets of Portugal Winner of the Premio Reina Sofia for Poetry
With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Luísa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems—in Margaret Jull Costa’s gorgeous English versions—seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask “What’s in a name?”
“How solid is a name if answered to,” Amaral answers, but “like the Rose—no, like its perfume: ungovernable. Free.”
Here is a lucid, forthright poet charmed by the paradoxes of each poem, by the tiny gestures and traces of life faceted within each poem, and by the vocation of poetry itself.
— Rachel Blau DuPlessis
With the original Portuguese to the left and the translated English to the right, this collection of poems beautifully weaves together myths, histories, voyages, and language with elegant ease. Amaral wears her attentiveness on her sleeve, deftly considering her place at home, in her city, and in the wilds.
— Drawn and Quarterly
This bilingual volume, pairing Costa’s translations with Amaral’s Portuguese originals, relies on humble imagery and plain language to plumb complicated truths.
— The New York Times Book Review
Lightning in a bottle…Amaral has a remarkable gift for making the personal universal and the universal intimate.
— Hasan Altaf, Paris Review Daily
Inspired: Amaral’s poetry possesses an intimacy that grants it a sense of timelessness. Yet it speaks to the moment we find ourselves in today.
— Translation and Literature
For the Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral, poetry and everyday life are closely intertwined. Her understated, elliptical, beautifully crafted, and ironic poems draw largely on domestic life but also on Greek myth, the Bible, and local architecture. What’s in a Name is both funny and deeply poignant: it should have a very wide readership!
— Marjorie Perloff
Brilliant: her words celebrate the hidden potentiality inside every woman—and the spontaneity of life itself, even in the contemplation of sudden death.
— Asymptote
Ana Luísa Amaral insists upon a reflection on art as an intensely human act. Her poetics is inextricably enmeshed with ethics.
— Professor Paulo de Medeiros
Amaral carves a space for fragmentation, uncertainty, and meditative silence within the repertoire of inherited forms. In this accomplished volume and translation, Amaral’s subtle experimentation makes strange an artistic repertoire we thought we knew.
— Publishers Weekly
Ana Luísa Amaral’s poems read as intimate conversations between the poet and reader, in either the early hours of morning or the late hours of night, where small, everyday moments quickly spiral into great cultural, historical, and even cosmic significance. Brilliant.