True to his own program but again taking everyone by surprise, João Cabral returned to “poetry for wider audiences” in 1984 with the publication of Auto do Frade (The Friar), which tells the last day in the life of Frei Caneca, who was sent to his death by the Portuguese court in 1825 for spreading republican ideas and for his role in the Pernambuco revolutionary movement of the previous year. Consisting of seven dialogues between the condemned Carmelite friar and the people of Recife who make up the chorus, it packed the same dramatic force as his first verse play, Death and Life of a Severino, and was poetically superior.
The title Agrestes (1985) means “rough, wild, rustic”; it also alludes to the semiarid, rocky region of Northeast Brazil known as the Agreste and situated between the Mata (on the coast) and the Sertão (in the interior). This compendium of ninety poems forms a kind of inside-out autobiography, the negative of a missing photo, in which the author reveals himself obliquely, through the topics he addresses. It begins with poems about Pernambuco, particularly childhood visions of it, and ends with poems that comment on death in Cabral’s customarily detached fashion. In between there are poems about places where he served as a diplomat — West Africa, Ecuador, and Spain — and about his favorite writers and artists, including Valéry, Paul Klee, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore, this last being the subject of three poems. In “Renewed Homage to Marianne Moore,” Cabral characterized the American poet’s concept of poetry as a crutch for a lame leg, as something that is created not to express what one has but to substitute for what he or she is missing. This recalls a distinction Cabral made, in an interview published in 1974, between “crutch poets” and poets he called “bleeders.” Writing, for the bleeders, is an overflow of their intense inner feeling, whereas crutch poets write to make up for what they do not feel, at least not in a spontaneous, emotional way.
In 1987, with the publication of Crime na Calle Relator (Crime on the Calle Relator), Cabral’s poetry shifted in yet another direction, toward storytelling. The sixteen poems that make up the collection narrate tales and anecdotes culled from his own experience or from what he learned secondhand. Half of the stories are set in Spain, and Cabral’s last collection was dedicated entirely to Spain, or rather, to his favorite city there or anywhere: Seville. Cabral may have been a “crutch poet,” but Seville brought out a bit of the “bleeder” in him. Which isn’t to say that his poetry became a mere outpouring of heartfelt sentiment, for it was the very sparseness of expression and economy of gestures that Cabral admired in certain bullfighters, in the “cante a palo seco” (a severe, a cappella style of singing), and in flamenco dancing. But the world of Andalusia aroused an exuberance in Cabral that was otherwise rare. Flamenco music was the only kind he ever admitted to liking, and the women he loved were Sevillian, even if they had never lived there and had no Spanish blood. The leadoff poem of his last book, Sevilha Andando (Seville Walking), published in 1989, is titled “The Woman from Seville Who Didn’t Know It” and pays homage to his very Brazilian second wife, the poet Marly de Oliveira. (His first wife, Stella Maria Barbosa de Oliveira, died in 1986; the couple had five children.) Women and Seville were frequent poetic subjects as far back as Four Spot, though they tended to function as tropes. In Seville Walking, Cabral delighted in them directly and sensually.
Reading Cabral’s last two books, we might suspect that he never really needed a crutch; that instead of making all those constructivist, thinglike poems to fill up an inner void, he could simply have spent more time in Seville, which drew out hidden, perhaps repressed facets of his personality. But we might as readily suspect that the city that had such a liberating effect on this poet was not the Seville that lies north of Cádiz and west of Córdoba but the Seville he invented, word-stone by word-stone, over several decades of his writing life.
Whatever the case, the world João Cabral re-created in poetry — a kind of verbal reconstitution of what is — will endure for a long time, both as a highly original artistic monument and as an invaluable didactic example. He has shown us a new way to make poetry and, what is more, a new way to see things. More modestly but no less importantly, he has directed our vision to certain plain and concrete things that we might never have stopped to consider before. “A stone is a stone is a stone” could not have been a João Cabral poem, but it could have been the conclusion to a poem, or to his entire poetic enterprise — hard and heavy, like everything real.
Richard Zenith, 2004