Tolentino Mendonça: From Insularity to the Poetry of the Body

Abstract

Tolentino Mendonça was born in 1965 on the Island of Madeira (Machico). Considered by many as one of the most representative poets of the new generation of Portuguese writers, Tolentino is the poet of saudade, of childhood, of the Body. His poetry is much more than mere simplicity or feeling; it is the poetry of affection, of the plurality of meanings, of the insularity of silence, from which a world – that of the materiality of the Body – is exposed.
In A Noite Abre Meus Olhos – Poesia reunida, the reader is not only brought back by the intricacies of memory, but is also confronted not with the Body as finitude, but as «fuga para a pluralidade dos sentidos», as «Verbo», without cutting the umbilical cord with the Soul. Here the five senses take shape and the limpidity of the verses acquire the contours of a Body.

Keywords

Poetry; Memory; Insularity; Body.