PRESENCE OF LIFE: POEMS

When she died in 1999 (a year short of her 100th birthday), lucid but fragile, Nita Lupi left behind a collection of poems she had been working on for the last twenty years of her life for a fifth book of poetry. These poems reflect the poet’s later years and deal with the cognition of her own frailty and mortality. While mostly focusing on the sensorial experiences of the poetic voice, some of the poems included here also present a metaphoric criticism of the political conjuncture of Portugal before and after the Carnation Revolution. Collectively, these works show a mature – and if not entirely disenchanted at least pragmatic – voice towards the self and its surroundings.