One step away from the anti-bird: The poetry of Orides Fontela

Abstract

Orides Fontela, one of the important names of Brazilian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, left a work composed of few titles, but always admired by critics. Since its debut in the late 1960s, Oridian production has revealed, alongside the tendency toward abstraction and transcendence, an acute understanding of the materiality of existence and the obstacles that make up the real world. This essay tries to emphasize, as essential aspects of Fontela‟s poetry, the presence of memory, the quotidian and the real – manifested, for example, in the recurrence of the symbol of blood. This essay also emphasizes the author's critical awareness of poetic creation, considered to be both rational and intuitive, demonstrating, from the point of view of literary history, her strong connection with the modern Brazilian tradition, notably with the poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto.