"I do not theorize: I observe. I do not imagine: I describe. I do not choose: I listen".This approach constitutes the starting point for the Tolentino Mendonça's poetrywho addresses, according to his own words, "the conditions of existence".. I vindicate his lyric poetry which, with a cultured base, astonishes for its eloquent and precise style, the use of visual images and the capacity to integrate in his compositions elements from very diverse sources, besides incorporating aspects of his own life trajectory, without the name of God -which is what is often expected when his biography is known- appearing or giving cause to consider him a manifestly religious poet and, much less, with moralizing purposes.
Moreover, when asked why there are hardly any explicit references in his verses to the divinity -there are, there are-, he has answered: "I believe that God is everywhere. The more material, the more spiritual. I always prefer an open language, even assuming the risk of ambiguity, to a narrow language, incapable of expressing complexity. I confess that sometimes my greatest difficulty is to find a trace of God in typified spiritual discourses. Everything that tries to domesticate God moves away from him". Therefore, if I had to define his poetry, I would say that it is the humanistic expression of a singular poetic creed, illuminated by the reading of his essays, in which, like a palimpsest, multiple cultural layers are superimposed, with which he constantly dialogues, which is why it is so suggestive of interpretative possibilities.
As a single flame
This intertextual world is a rhetorical tool on which he elaborates a poetics based on the din of daily life, with special "attention to reality, a relentless attention, sensitive to the visible and the invisible, to the audible and the unmentionable."In short, his lyrical work is a profound look at the enigmas, scars and hopes of man's intricate existence. That is why, when reading his poems, one knows that they speak of crucial themes related to the human condition and that they embrace the material and the spiritual in complete interrelation, thus showing that poetry is a space where there are no boundaries and where the sublime and the crude, the natural and the artificial, what was and what is can be found together: "The poem may contain: true things, wrong things, poisons to keep out of reach / country excursions [...] / a civil war / a Smiths record / ocean currents instead of literary currents."he writes in GraphiteThis is one example, among many others, where Tolentino Mendonça gives visibility to his way of proceeding when he undertakes a poem.
The same title of his collected poetry, The night opens my eyesrefers to the breadth of vision offered by poetic creation; a title which, as the poet himself has stated, reflects his "cross-border dialect, because it mixes a reference to a song by The Smiths [Tolentino Mendonça is undoubtedly referring to the song There is a light that never goesThere is a light that never goes out.] with a clear evocation of the theology of the 'Dark Night' of St. John of the Cross. The profane and the sacred rise up as a single flame"..
A motionless traveler
For this literary incursion, the Madeiran poet presents himself as a motionless traveler: "Standing still we make the great journeys".. However, although he writes his poetry from stillness, he demonstrates a keen ability to discern what eventually fades with time: "We suddenly cease to perceive / the depth of the fields / the great mysteries / the truths we swore to preserve." of that which leaves an indelible mark on the soul: "...".But it takes years / to forget someone / who has just looked at us."thus making it possible for his poetic activity to be perceived as a search for himself, decidedly enriched by the interaction with others in the construction of his own identity.
This interaction implies the gaze of the other, who not only looks but also is another. In this sense, it manifests itself as a means to share, confront and understand the human experience while contributing to the co-creation of the universe of his poems, adding layers of darkness and beauty. It is an idea, undoubtedly, capital, which gives light to many of his compositions, very similar to that of the late Pope Benedict XVI when he affirmed that: "Only service to others open my eyes [emphasis added by the author of the article]. to what God does for me and how much he loves me."although Tolentino Mendonça presents it in a more subtle way, interwoven in the rhetoric of the verses and using "the night" as the subject of the grammatical sentence.
Living the body
In any case, if poetry is for him a search that requires stillness -and I take, albeit very briefly, one more step in the development of his poetics-, this search is only possible from the body. Or to put it another way: the body is the place or situation in which each person is closest to himself. Although we are not only the body, Tolentino Mendonça believes that in and through it "we live, we move and we exist".more: "The senses of our body open us to the experience of God in this world." or as he announces in the poem What a body can: "We live the body, we coincide / in each of its powers: we move our hands / we feel cold, we see the white of the birches / we hear on the other shore / or above the hazelnut trees / the cawing of the crows.". From this bodily awareness, the importance of being fully connected with somatic sensations and experiences, either through breathing or simply being aware of internal sensations, is emphasized. There are many compositions that abound in this, especially in his collection of poems Frontier theory (2017), where he states, "The body knows how to read what has not been written". o "The body is the state where everyone / breathes closest to himself.".
School of silence
But this is not the end of his lyrical universe. Like the body, silence is another of his great themes. In fact, in the collection of poems The poppy and the monk (2013) even dedicates to him a series of short texts entitled School of silence. It states: "To silence in order to make people say". o "May your silence be such / That not even thought will think it."thus demonstrating that there are more worlds than the dictatorship of noise, and that silence is a form of resistance to the hustle and bustle of life.a place of struggle, of searching and waiting" - a place of struggle, of searching and waiting.expresses in one of his essays-. "Little by little we join the possibility of giving space, of opening our life to the other, allowing ourselves to be inhabited by the revelation of otherness". And it is there, in the otherness, where all his lyrical work converges, either from silence, either from the body, either from stillness or from the cultural intertextuality in which this poetry so in need of a prompt translation into Spanish moves.
