against the currents of time

Two books, one released in February 2025 and another, more recent, from January this year, are basically a diptych. The titles are these: Features (the 25) and 987654321 (or 26).

That title works as a general postulate: to present the characteristics of our time, of this era characterized by “servile projects”, with the poet waiting for “the rubbish to surface / looking sadly at the childish memory / of a river as vast as the sky / before he had electronic eyes”. The most recent book can be read as a caustic observation, even more disenchanted, of what in the first set of texts was the certainty of a process of decline in the West that was impossible to disguise (“You managed to make us sedentary so well, / and now you are dealing // with savage immigrations’”) and is now – with this title showing the countdown of our era – the observation of History in its long period, Modernity: “The cold of this era, ours, / the silhouette behind the curtain, / the miserable ejaculation: premature / substitute for weaning (…).”

In effect, a diptych. But it makes sense for it to be so, given that in the harsh, analytical, dry, austere poetry (the work of the phrase, the strophic arrangement, the choice of the quatrain and the triplet, the couplet and the monostic, the metrical care, with a subtle inclination towards the decasyllable that is diluted in the colloquial phrase, averse to artificial classicisms) by Paulo da Costa Domingos (with Carlos Poças Falcão and Luís Adriano Carlos, Jorge Vaz de Carvalho and Jorge Fazenda Lourenço, one of the most uncomfortably lyrical voices in current lyricism due to which there is a “rude fraud” in all of them and an authentic dive into another time, which is that of poetry transforming the real into a language that can be felt, savored, enjoyed by reading aloud verses, looking behind the dreary time for the beauty of images that pierce, rare things that these poets know how to surprise), the poem is, above all, not a wall of lamentations, but a perimeter surrounded by wire barbed.