Book, Arremate: poems[LS]

Book that marks the eighty years of one of the main active Brazilian poets. Armando Freitas Filho, one of the most important voices in Brazilian poetry, turns eighty with a book that deals directly with the present moment. The poems visit themes known to their readers — such as the house, Rio de Janeiro, his passion for Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Van Gogh — but they also respond, hotly, to the news, in sharp verses about politics, violence and police brutality. . The marks of time are embedded in Arremate's poems, which reflect on maturity. The craft of writing appears as one of the central axes of the book. The poem “Trifásico” sheds light on the poet’s backstage: he first writes by hand, then passes it to the typewriter and, finally, the poem appears, already clean, on the computer screen. In “Caderno”, Armando Freitas Filho masterfully summarizes his poetics: “Memory is made of the thin paper/ that separates one page from another”.