There are weeks when literature merely accompanies the world, and there are weeks when literature becomes necessary to its survival. Today, Filamentos — Arts & Letters in the Azorean Diaspora begins one of those necessary journeys.

Over the next seven days, Words Against Darkness — Seven Azorean Women Poets Honored by the Cátedra Natália Correia will bring readers into the luminous presence of seven women whose poetry emerged from the Atlantic islands yet spoke always to the wider human condition. Their words crossed solitude, exile, memory, rebellion, tenderness, and freedom with the rare courage of those who understood that poetry is not an escape from history, but a way of confronting it.

At a moment when the world again trembles beneath intolerance, war, cultural amnesia, and the exhaustion of public language, these Azorean voices return with renewed urgency. They remind us that literature can still serve as conscience, refuge, resistance, and moral imagination. Their islands were never prisons of geography, but observatories of humanity.

Presented by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, through the Cátedra Natália Correia, this series also continues the enduring belief that culture must travel beyond borders, beyond nostalgia, and beyond silence itself. Through these seven poets, Filamentos invites readers into what might be called an Atlantic republic of words — a space where poetry becomes a bridge between generations, continents, and fragile human hopes.

For even in difficult times, language still carries light.

TODAY WE HONOR THE POET ÂNGELA ALMEIDA

I

i wonder about the morning silences
of the field

so much fear on the border
of relief

the rescue of the mouth against
the hold of the journey

only the ship’s chimneys fly
and whisper the name I gave you
when a wind lamp
lit the boat
that carried the last chord
of violins in the cracks of the skin

you remember love when
you kept the wheat in the interval
of time

so beautiful was the drawing
of the body in the field surrendered
to the breeze
that showed the wrinkle of the
insistent pause

so beautiful were the
hallucinated arms
with the wing over the
piano’s keys

I emigrate to you
torn in musical notes
while your arms
cross the slender wheat

there are voices that flee through the grooves of the earth
and run after ships that fly
to southern latitudes

how beautiful is the reflection
of the voyage

here the field
is the interval between the borders
of my condition

and the scores intone spasms
that burst in the center of the stone

while the sobs grow

grow so much that they gather me
and return me to the calligraphy of the birds

with it I leave for the other side
of this fortune

II

that is the howl
of the dogs

that will die today

in Myanmar
and Syria

when an immense edict steals the
chaste blood

of the innocent

to announce with it the triumph
of a purgative
in the town square

where applause will be the
single bullet

that will forever silence
the bark

that fed u

III

i was born on a day
to the west
with a flute in my mouth
covered with indecipherable alphabets

that spoke of migrating places
and far way
where children ate the musical sounds
of golden sands
while mothers were torn apart
in deserts covered
by the blood of religions

with this heritage I live
among the herbs I chew
to quench the thirst of my river
abandoned by the drops
of the rain that fed
the crust now undone
in dry sobs

are the hollow sounds
of the throat in agony

now that there isn’t
any trace of water

IV

no one knows of the birds
that inhabit the station of the wisteria

nor of the ascending flights
to noble and edenic destinations

nor of the beginning or end
of journeys to ancient palaces

nor of the delay nor of the return
of such birds

nobody knows

nobody knows of the birds
that inhabit the station of the wisteria

nor of the temporal flights
to disfigured and weak waters

nor of the light nor of the shadow
on journeys to abandoned rivers

nor of the agony nor of the fortune
of such birds

no one knows

Translated by Diniz Borges

Preface to Calligraphy of the Birds by Fernando Dacosta

Remarkable for her subtlety, Ângela de Almeida advances in the Portuguese literary world by unveiling herself to better conceal herself through an unequaled aesthetic, ethic, and poetics.

Endowed with unique resources that her intelligence and experience highlight, she creates her own spaces for herself and her work, achieving an uncommon affirmation of writing and imagery.

Her latest book, Calligraphy of the Birds, contains some of the best poems recently appearing among us.

Going through it, we find singular illuminations, as in the Cycle of Hours, where a remarkable poem becomes a cantata of infinite perturbation.

“A woman hugging a window goes by/ and a man with the roof on his shoulders/ a circus without a clown goes by/ as does a wheel/ the last carriage of a / hallucinated train goes by (…)”

Ângela de Almeida is a person who knows how to find paths, to assert herself as different, solidary, sensitive, who has in persistence, in availability, maps without retreat.

One knows that nobody comes out of nothing. We must remember that poetry is, together with the chronicle, the great pillar of Portuguese literature.

Ângela de Almeida is part of the plethora of its creators who resist, write, and publish.

With an exceptional command of the word, she retains images, ideas, and feelings that she communicates slowly, in suspended complicity.

 Concise and contained, her work has made her a reference author within our culture.

Fernando Dacosta (translation by Diniz Borges)

From the book Caligraphy of the Birds–You can order it online–link below to all Bruma Books

Bruma Publications – Books for all Seasons distributed by IAAS.

In Calligraphy of the Birds, Ângela Almeida confirms herself as one of the most refined and essential poetic voices writing in the Portuguese language from the Azores today. Her poetry does not merely inhabit language — it transforms it into atmosphere, breath, music, wound, and illumination. Each poem unfolds like a fragile yet unbreakable architecture of memory, exile, tenderness, silence, and human longing.

What distinguishes Almeida’s work is her extraordinary ability to fuse the intimate and the universal. The islands are everywhere in these poems — in the wheat fields, the sea winds, the trembling gardens, the departing ships, the cracked stones — yet the emotional geography reaches far beyond the Azores into the fractured anxieties of the contemporary world. Her verses carry the cadence of migration, the ache of war, the fragility of love, and the persistent search for human dignity amid spiritual exhaustion.

There is also a rare musicality in her poetic construction. Ângela Almeida writes with the precision of someone who understands silence as deeply as sound. Her imagery moves between delicacy and devastation, often within the same line, creating a poetry suspended between dream and testimony. Like the great Atlantic poets, she writes from the edge of land and history, where language itself becomes both refuge and resistance.

With Calligraphy of the Birds, Ângela Almeida offers not simply a collection of poems, but a profound cartography of the human condition. Hers is a poetry of immense sophistication and emotional intelligence — lyrical, philosophical, and deeply humane — securing her place among the premier contemporary voices of Portuguese-language literature emerging from the Azorean archipelago.

Diniz Borges

A poeta Ângela Almeida com alunas da Universidade do Estado da Califórnia em Fresno