Nemésio at Rest
When I first began to hear talk of Nemésio,
talk of such praise and admiration, what first
caught my fancy was that he spent summers
at Praia da Vitória (not in, mind you, but at,
for I had no idea what P. da. V. signified,
never having been there and knowing Terceira
then only from having landed at Lajes decades
earlier on my way to Lisbon. I heard that he
fancied the viola and thus imagined him sitting
cross-legged on the shore, looking out at endless
waves, and serenading the unseen (except to an
inner eye) mermaids of that endless sea. Then
practicality barged in and I thought, well how
long could he do that? Imagine, a whole summer
of singing and playing to a silent choir of creatures
one could not entice into a windy café for a drink.
June 23, 2013
George Monteiro is a lifelong student and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contributing to the scholarship on numerous writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan. His latest book is Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012).
