A knife to the teeth

“Mano Forte,” as Luiz Pacheco nicknamed him, was the last great Portuguese surrealist poet, the one most admired by Cesariny, the most uncompromising, the hardest, the one who never separated poetry from the poet’s ethical duty. He had a knife between his teeth:

"Poetic action implies: towards love, a passionate attitude; towards friendship, an uncompromising attitude; towards revolution, a pessimistic attitude; towards society, a threatening attitude."

During the more than 20 years he spent as the person in charge of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Mobile Libraries, travelling in a Citroën packed with books, he brought culture and the pleasure of reading to isolated regions of the country. 

Forte’s voice is not plural, not direct or sinuously derived, not indebted. Like all poetry, true poetry possesses only its tradition.

Herberto Helder