Listening for Lost Creeks: Recollecting Absence via Alberto Caeiro and Eirin Moure

This article traces the buried creeks of Toronto through Eirin Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person, which translates and transports Alberto Caeiro’s O Guardador de Rebanhos from rural Portugal to urban pastoral. Undermining more recent attempts to resurrect or disinter the creeks lost beneath the city grid, Moure’s and Pessoa/Caeiro’s anti-anaesthetic poetics and plural persons promise neither the pathetic personification of urban water, nor a problematic return to aural or lyric presence. Taken together, their polyglot Sheep instead perform an adverse pastoralism, one that recollects the potentially anaesthetic effects of aestheticizing creeks (among other things) and unburies our poetic fallacies about Nature by rendering them present as fetishes.