K3

K3, by Nuno Dempster, is one of the best books of poetry published in Portugal in recent years and the most astonishing approach to the horror of the Colonial War since Catalabanza, Quilolo e Volta, by Fernando Assis Pacheco (1976).

A long poem of epic scope, K3 recounts the author's military experience in Guinea and seeks to rescue from the darkness of oblivion the "anti-heroes" who fought by his side, those involuntary representatives of the "defeated generations to whom it fell / to close empires", men used as cannon fodder by a decaying regime.

"And these people come to me like a weight, / they do not leave my memory, / they do not leave my poem, / they have followed me, hidden, to this day",

in BUALA, 29 June 2011