The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems

Introduction

Introduction "Compared to my heart's desire/ the sea is a drop!' 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. There is a lot of the color yellow here, and almost as much mathematics. And, seemingly at every turn, there is food. I first met Adelia Prado in 1985, in her kitchen in Divinopolis. Ever since stumbling on a seven-line poem by her in an obscure Brazilian literary magazine, I had been wanting to sit across a table from this woman and talk about my translating the rage and delight of her poetry into English. When, years later, I arrived on her doorstep , manuscript of translations in hand, and blurted that I was famished, she was visibly pleased—the only other North American she had met had refused to eat a thing—and sat me down to a huge meal of beans and rice with all the trimmings. Appetite is crucial to Prado: Forty years old: I don't want a knife or even cheese— I want hunger. This poet cooks, eats, chews memories, confesses to gluttony: "I nibble vegetables as if they were carnal encounters." Sexual hunger is admitted as frankly as any other. We see a woman tempted by "the vibrations of the flesh," byu the preciseconfiguration of lips," who listens u most closely to the voice that is impassioned," a "woman startled by sex,/ but delighted." There is an abundance of dark things also. There are "drowning victims, chopping blocks,/ forged signatures."There is cancer. There are moments of quiet desperation: What thick rope, what a full pail, what a fat sheaf of bad things. What an incoherent life is mine, what dirty sand. Vll The appeal of these poems has to do with their wonderful specificity , their nakedness, and their desire to embrace everything in sight—as well as things invisible. Here is a "creature of the body" who experiences great spiritual craving, who believes that the spirit is almost as palpable. After all, the divine is only accessible to us via the concrete stuff of human existence. "From inside geometry/ God looks at me and I am terrified." The very thought inspires fear and awe, but it is an intimate, face-to-face spiritual encounter Prado is after: The word made flesh. She craves something that neither dies nor withers, is neither tall nor distant, nor avoids meeting my hard, ravenous look. Unmoving beauty: the face of God, which will kill my hunger. What is truly astonishing in all this abundance of appetites is that Prado seems to revel in turning them loose in the same poem. What some might see as contradictory impulses appear and reappear obsessively, overlap and intertwine. For Prado, this is not only a fact of life but also the first step to understanding what it's like to live both in our bodies and out of them. "It's the soul that's erotic," she declares in one poem, and in another: "I know, now, that my erotic fantasies/ were fantasies of heaven." Hunger inspires hunger for the reverse: "There's no way not to think about death, among so much deliciousness, and want to be eternal." If God possesses an "unspeakable seductive power," it is also true that "a voluptuous woman in her bed/ can praise God,/ even if she is nothing but voluptuous and happy." On the other hand, if at times "Sex is frail,/ even the sex of men," so is belief, whose buoyancy does not cancel the unacceptability of mortality. Death is a "trick." At times Prado is "tempted to believe that some things,/ in fact, have no Easter." The "furious love" of God "Who is a big mother hen" is often hard to understand: He tucks us under His wing and warms us. But first He leaves us helpless in the rain, so we'll learn to trust in Him and not in ourselves. Vlll One of Prado's great gifts is knowing that embracing life means embracing impossible contradictions. The fear of death is inseparable from the pleasure of simply living. Sometimes one poem, or one line, seems to take back what another has said—"what I say, I unsay" But she also says: "what I feel, I write." For her, writing is a way...