Book, Portraits with error: poems[LS]

One of the greatest poets of our time, Eucanaã Ferraz explores concrete and imagined worlds, the said and the unsaid, secrets and facts in his new book. Between the concrete and the imagined, between fairy tales and horror stories, Portraits with Error draws many worlds that, like distorted mirrors, multiply and deform. If on the one hand Eucanaã Ferraz describes with vehement lyricism zealous love and torrid desire, beauty and perfection, on the other hand horror, fear, madness and a frazzled laughter coexist in the same frame. And where is the error? “I wasn’t the one who made the world/ and I know that counts in my favor”, the poet writes. The portrait, apparently, is never complete. Divided into parts, or “folds”, the book begins in the second. The first one is missing. Although the three blocks clearly dialogue in their structure and organization, this missing part, a kind of phantom limb, leaves the drawing forever suspended, unfinished. It is up to the reader to decide whether the 22 poems that make up each part, articulated horizontally, in constant dialogue, confirm or contradict each other. Between the said and the unsaid, Portraits with Error brings to the fore princes, queens, thieves, poets, murderers, drunks and magicians, amidst an avalanche of intimate confessions and the most factual newspaper reports. In this whirlwind of real and invented characters, descriptions that are sometimes direct and sometimes wild, a line from the book summarizes the whole with absolute clarity: “only the silence that shines is gold”.