The reciprocal relationship of the two regions is demonstrated in Landscapes with Figures (1956), where there is a pendular shift of geographical setting from one poem to the next (in the full-length work). This alternation between Pernambuco and Spain would occur throughout the rest of the poet’s career, sometimes within a single collection and sometimes on a larger scale, with entire books set in or evoking one or the other of the two places. Landscapes also set the technical parameters of Cabral’s most typical machine mold: sixteen of the eighteen poems are built out of quatrains, and perfect or assonantal rhyme (more frequently the latter) is employed throughout in an abcb scheme. And the machine worked. Cabral put almost nothing into it and managed to pull out stunning poems. The landscapes are all bleak or empty — three cemeteries, the “anonymous, plainfaced” sugarcane field, a “place in La Mancha / where the Castilian plain is hardest,” the “almost static” Capibaribe flowing through Recife’s “sclerosis and cement” — and the figures that inhabit them mostly dead or destitute; but the poet was able to find or create life in these desolate scenes.
Uma Faca Só Lâmina (1956; A Knife All Blade) was Cabral’s most technically brilliant poem-machine. Three words, or images, or metaphors — a knife, a clock, and a bullet — weave in and around and in place of each other over the course of 352 verses, divided into eleven sections of eight stanzas with four lines containing seven syllables each. Perhaps because he realized that this poem smacked of an exercice de style, he published it and Landscapes with Figures in a book that also contained a lower-tension, higher-access poetry. Titled Duas Águas (Two Waters) and including both new and older works, the book’s subtitle indicated the two broad divisions of Cabral’s entire poetic output: Poetry of Reflective Concentration and Poetry for Wider Audiences. The latter category encompassed Cabral’s long narrative poems — The Dog without Feathers and O Rio — and the previously unpublished Morte e Vida Severina (Death and Life of a Severino), a verse drama. A staged version of this new work, with music by singer and composer Chico Buarque, won prizes in Brazil and France in 1966 and brought international renown to Cabral. “There are many of us Severinos / all with the very same life,” explains the protagonist, an archetype of the desperate Sertanejo who migrates to Recife from the drought-scourged Sertão.
This, Cabral’s most popular work, was not one he cherished, judging it less well crafted than others. But it served, in his overall production, as an antidote to the danger that “work can become exercise, an activity performed for its own sake” and leading ultimately to “the death of communication.” Cabral followed up this warning, issued in a lecture delivered in 1952, with an indictment of poets who don’t take into consideration their readers, “the essential counterpart to the activity of creating literature.” A poet’s richness, he argued, “can only originate in reality.” Death and Life of a Severino, in keeping with the implied agenda, was grounded in the reality of Pernambuco not only thematically but formally, for it picked up on a local tradition of verse plays accompanied by music and dancing.
Cabral’s more rigorously constructed work, his “poetry of reflective concentration,” reached its highest level of achievement in the 1960s, with the publication of Four Spot (1960), Serial (1961) and Education by Stone (1966). Although the poet claimed to be indifferent to music, the title of the second book recalls the serial technique of dodecaphonic composers, and the arrangement of its component parts lives up to the ideal. Obsessively driven by the number four, the book’s sixteen poems all have four parts consisting exclusively of quatrains. In the first poem each part has two quatrains; in the second poem, four quatrains; in the third poem, six quatrains; in the fourth poem, eight. The series repeats, occurring four times in all. Education by Stone, on the other hand, is a kind of poetic equivalent in verse to Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. Its forty-eight poems — all of which contain either sixteen or twenty-four verses divided into two parts of varying length — are formulated like theorems whose truth is tested by antithesis. Counterpoint abounds, with frequent syntactic and semantic inversions, and the second part of each poem is usually a corollary, an analogue, or mirror version of the first part.
The play of oppositions is greatest in “The Sea and the Canefield” and “The Canefield and the Sea.” The first line of the first poem, “What the sea learns from the canefield,” is negatively restated in the fifth line, “What the sea doesn’t learn from the canefield,” and then inverted in the first line of the second part, “What the canefield learns from the sea,” which is in turn negatively restated in the fifth line. The poem’s sixteen verses are all repeated in the inversely titled poem, “The Canefield and the Sea,” but in different order, and with the verb “learn from” being replaced by its linguistic counterpart, “teach.” The most famous poem in this collection, “Weaving the Morning,” uses the interconnected cries of cocks crowing at dawn as a metaphor for the human solidarity that enables each day to take shape and proceed smoothly.
The intricately woven poems of Education by Stone are Cabral’s best demonstration of how words, things and people are inextricably connected, and of how it is possible to highlight, reinforce and augment those connections, thereby increasing meaning in language and in life itself. What João Cabral ultimately wanted to offer his readers was not finished poetic products but their example, their lesson, an education in how to make words into stones useful — and used — for building. His ideal for his verbal edifices is expressed in “Tale of an Architect,” where architecture is conceived as the construction not of walls but of openness, with houses consisting exclusively of doors (“doors-leading-to, never doors-against”) and a sheltering roof.
It is hard to imagine how Cabral’s poetry could have developed any further as architecture or engineering, and the poet did not attempt a repeat performance of his achievement but chose instead to explore other paths. The eighty poems of Catchall Museum (1975) were, as the title suggests, a diversified miscellany, with themes ranging from Mauritania to Proust to soccer (Cabral was a champion player as an adolescent), but close to half of the compositions comment on writers and artists in epigrammatic fashion.
In 1980 The School of Knives, set entirely in Pernambuco and based largely on childhood reminiscences, surprised everyone with its unprecedented autobiographical content. We are still in school, but now the subject is the lesson of his upbringing, and the knives of the title mean something different from what they once did. In A Knife All Blade the knife represented linguistic incisiveness and sharpness of vision, as it did in the poem “Yes Against Yes,” where it served as a writing instrument for Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge, two of the poets Cabral held up as models of compositional precision. In his 1980 work the knife became the razor-sharp leaf of sugarcane (in the title poem) as well as the scar-inflicting sickle of his childhood on sugar plantations (in “Plantation Boy”). The engineer’s principles were still at work but had been internalized, and the new cutting edge — made of memory and milieu — conferred a more intimate tone on the poems.