A SERENE AND LUMINOUS CRAFT: ON EM NOME DA LUZ — by José António Gomes
João Ricardo Lopes’s poetry is built — the term is apt — from small illuminations: singular moments, magical settings (Assisi, Cremona, Rome, the south of Lanzarote, but also Esposende, the waves and a lighthouse, a classroom, the old primary school of childhood…), fragments of films, paintings, and musical compositions (Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Schubert…). But above all, it is built from that almost imperceptible vibration of simple things — the kind that so often form the very core of the poem and merge with the poem’s own language.
Concerning this idea of poetic construction, I would point, for example, to a verse that seems essential to reading this work, and which speaks of the “rigorous labour of birthing a new poem,” adding that “it is this that warms you — always has,” as we read in Impromptus D. 899/Opus 90, Schubert (p. 32).
One might also consider a less common term found in the book — «Serendipismo» (Serendipity), the title of a poem and a word that refers, as dictionaries explain, to the ability to make happy discoveries by chance. This concept could well describe João Ricardo Lopes’s poetics in Em Nome da Luz (In the Name of Light, 2022). Indeed, many of the poems — generally brief, marked by a serene yet distinctive prosody — reflect a poetics of serendipity. The poetic subject walks, travels, to encounter a certain splendour in things.
But it is not only the poetic “I” that traverses these pages. Others pass through too: Roma people — praised simply for existing — as well as friends and companions from other times, beloved human figures, and still others who populate the realm of painting. (This is, after all, the work of a cultivated poet, deeply attuned to music, the visual arts, and literature.) I mention painting in particular because we see many works of art in this book, beginning with one that serves almost as a paradigm, or at least as a trigger and guiding presence in the reading: Saint Joseph the Carpenter, by Georges de La Tour (cf. p. 13).
I find myself deeply drawn to this poetry: serene, rigorous, a seeker of light. It is fully aware of the poet’s craft and engages in a rich, open dialogue with a wide range of artistic and literary works, many of which are signalled through epigraphs, though not only (even Luiza Neto Jorge and one of her celebrated poems are subtly evoked in filigree in Magnólia, p. 14 — whether consciously or unconsciously, I cannot say).
In Em Nome da Luz, one also feels a love for simple things — a quality that draws the reader poem after poem, as if these things carried, as they indeed do, a strange and vital power (as we sense in the opening piece, almost unexpectedly titled Ética, p. 7). Even when we realise that these simple things are inseparable from great works of art or iconic places. Echoing Sophia, the vehemence of such things is one of the book’s finest qualities: “the morning is clean, silent, vehement” — we read in the opening line of the beautiful poem Um grande bem em nós acordou (“A Great Good Awoke in Us”, p. 16).
Composed of place, time, and memory, Em Nome da Luz is, in short, a beautiful volume of poetry. It is distinguished by a discursive tone emerging from a voice with a singular cadence and inflection, addressed to a “you” that seems a reflection — or refraction — of the same voice. The language is both precise and rich, with a marked appreciation for unusual but expressive words. And it is beautiful, too, for the quiet wisdom that runs through it — not untouched by melancholy — a wisdom that shapes the entire collection. One must also highlight the strong visual quality of the writing and, as already noted, a striking sense of poetic construction.
For all these reasons — and others which time does not allow me to explore here — Em Nome da Luz (a title that might itself serve as a key to the book’s poetics, and which we return to in the final poem) is a worthy and well-deserved recipient of the 2022 Vila de Fânzeres Poetry Prize (31st edition). It is a work that brings prestige to this important, longstanding, and praiseworthy initiative for the promotion of poetry — an initiative for which we are indebted to the Fânzeres Parish Council.
