Accidents

A poetry book published eight years after A Terceira Miséria. It brings together thirty-five poems by the author.

«I read the disillusionment and despondency of Hélia Correia in “Acidentes” and followed her as far as I could: underlining the flaying of words, the work of men who subject them to the ridiculous.

 “Let fall, let fall a word,/and another, and another,/the bones of the banquet,/so that I may cast them and pick them up with my mouth,/(...)” and, in “Distracção,” the continuous and murderous thinning of Nature in harmony with the idea “(...) of that thing they call utopia/because it has no place in nature,/and which, for lack of roots, does not last/much longer than a luminous insect.(...)”; and Hélia Correia returns once again to the word to warn us that poetry has a long-standing (addictive) relationship with metaphors, turning wolves into the cliché image of evil.

But “(...) They will kill/only because there is a thought,/like a tumor,/in that which constitutes them. (...)”; the distrust of science creates a poetic attitude of fusion with it, since “once the founding astonishment has passed,” everything is possible because the Masters, humanity, have tamed everything, drawn everything on maps, brought everything home, and equally drawn the extermination.

If everything has been unveiled, will there then be room for poetry? “When the time comes, everything that separated/science and poetry will cease/to exist on earth.” The mystery of breathing, by Hélia Correia’s hand, has always been a mystery.

The lungs that pulse with life, the transformation of air in the body, cannot be explained by the movement of cells and blood. Only through poetry can this pulsing, this vital transformation, be felt.»

in Deriva das Palavras: “Acidentes,” by Hélia Correia

Hélia Correia (1949) is a contemporary Portuguese writer. She holds a degree in Romance Philology and is a secondary school Portuguese teacher. Despite her love of poetry, it is as a fiction writer that she is recognized as one of the revelations of Portuguese novella writing from the generation of 1980, although her short stories, novellas, or novels are always imbued with poetic discourse.