Eye of the Island
£9
Join us at the free online book launch on 21st May to get a 10% discount on the book!
Born on Cape Verde’s São Vicente Island, Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) served as Cape Verde’s ambassador to both Portugal and Angola. A poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Fortes wrote in both Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese. His first collection, Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year the Estado Novo regime collapsed in Portugal, which led to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Throughout his career, Corsino Fortes’s poems offered vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country – word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body.
The PTC first published Corsino Fortes in 2008, a short chapbook with poems translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O’Brien. Corsino also visited the UK as part of our early World Poet Tours. We are honoured to present a wider, posthumous selection of this seminal poet’s work as part of the PTC’s World Poet Series.
“I would recommend this magnificent, generous, and bilingual presentation of Corsino Fortes’s work to anyone who enjoys grappling with the poignant, the sensuous, and the esoteric.”
– Asymptote Journal
“This collaborative translation of Corsino Fortes’ impassioned and oracular poetry is an important and rich resource for the English-language reader. Fortes’s poems inhabit an earth made flesh, and although the poems concern Cape Verde and its bloody colonial history, they reach always for the universal in suffering and oppression.”
– Sasha Dugdale
“Geology and geography collide in Corsino Fortes’s poetry to create a complex genealogy of feelings towards memory and colonialism, and the African landscape and mind-scape. With volcanic candour, these eloquently translated poems speak of ‘Sun and carbon joining / The body and soul’ and capture the solitude and solidarity of everyday life where realism and metaphysics are quotidian like our sun and bread.”
– Kit Fan
