Lara Gularte’s Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time

Some books arrive quietly. Others seem to have waited generations before finding the language worthy of carrying them into the world. Lara Gularte’s Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time, published jointly by Bruma Publications of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at Fresno State and Letras Lavadas Edições, belongs unmistakably to the latter. It is not merely a collection of poems. It is an ancestral conversation. A return voyage. A homeland recovered not by geography, but by imagination.

The Atlantic has always been more than water. Between California and the Azores it became a vast archive where memory refused to drown. In these pages the ocean remembers what history often forgets. Stones remember names no census ever recorded. Wind becomes genealogy. Fog becomes inheritance. Poetry becomes the language through which generations separated by oceans recognize one another once again.

Lara Gularte herself understands this journey with remarkable clarity. Reflecting upon the publication of this volume, she writes that she considers Soul of Black Stone “a noteworthy life achievement,” adding that she is profoundly grateful “that my family from the Azores and California breathe again through my poems.” Few authors have ever defined their life’s work with such quiet elegance.

She recalls that while other girls kept diaries, she wrote poems. Poetry became her first language of discovery, the place where images revealed identity before biography ever could. Inspired by her great-grandmother and by stories carried across the Atlantic, she grew curious about “the homeplace,” searching for that uniquely Portuguese emotion that no translation has ever fully contained: saudade. Later journeys to the islands did not satisfy that longing—they transformed it. As she herself observes, forging a closer diasporic relationship with the Azores through writing became “a transformative journey informing and expanding my identity.”

That transformation permeates every page of this extraordinary collection. The poet moves effortlessly between California orchards and volcanic cliffs, between family cemeteries and Atlantic tides, between remembered voices and imagined ancestors. She belongs completely to both landscapes, yet entirely to neither. Her true country is language. In California Bride she writes:

“I wear her eyes,
speak in her voice.”

Few lines express more profoundly the mystery of inherited identity. A descendant becomes the continuation of those who came before—not through blood alone, but through memory. Elsewhere, in one of the defining poems of the collection, she writes:

“My ancestors are stones in the river.”

Those words may well stand among the most unforgettable lines written by an American poet of Portuguese descent. The ancestors remain fixed, enduring, geological, while the river of history continues its relentless flow around them. Identity becomes permanence and movement at once.

Throughout Soul of Black Stone, black volcanic stone ceases to be landscape and becomes scripture. The islands speak. In Vila da Fajãzinha she gathers

“black stones on a black beach”

before asking the haunting question:

“and wonders if her future
can be lived out of the past.”

That question echoes throughout the entire volume. Can memory become tomorrow? Can migration preserve rather than erase? Can distance deepen belonging?

Lara Gularte answers not through argument but through poetry.

The result places her naturally within the great continuum of Azorean letters. Like Vitorino Nemésio, she understands the sea as destiny. Like Dias de Melo, she recognizes the dignity carried by those who crossed oceans with little more than courage. Like Emanuel Félix, she discovers lyric revelation in volcanic solitude. Like Natália Correia, she transforms saudade into an expansive meditation on freedom, imagination, and identity.

Yet her voice remains unmistakably her own. Writing from California, she extends that literary tradition across the Atlantic, allowing the Azorean imagination to flourish within the landscapes of the American West. Her poetry neither imitates nor remembers those writers; it converses with them, enlarging the very idea of what Azorean literature has become in the twenty-first century.

This is precisely why Vamberto Freitas has long regarded Lara Gularte as one of the essential literary voices of the Portuguese-American experience. Her poetry has consistently expanded the boundaries of diasporic literature while remaining deeply rooted in the emotional geography of the Azores. She refuses sentimental nostalgia. Instead, she transforms memory into living literature, where ancestry becomes not the burden of the past but the creative force of the future.

Whaling, migration, ritual, family, death, resurrection, return—these elemental rhythms move through the collection like tides. In Francisco de Cabral: A Whaler’s Story, the violence and humanity of the Atlantic whaling tradition recall Dias de Melo’s monumental Dark Stones, while becoming something entirely new through Gularte’s compassionate imagination. The Holy Ghost festivals emerge not merely as cultural celebrations but as sacred acts of communal remembrance. In Festa do Emigrante, perhaps one of the most emotionally resonant poems in the volume, the emigrant’s return becomes both homecoming and estrangement:

“Those on shore don’t remember names.
One man throws his arms
around his mother’s neck.
She slips his grasp,
believing him a ghost.”

Few contemporary poems have rendered the emotional paradox of emigration with greater tenderness. What ultimately distinguishes Soul of Black Stone is its refusal to allow memory to become passive nostalgia.

As suggested in the preface, these poems remind us that identity, like the sea itself, survives generations of distance. Heritage does not disappear with time; it transforms, resurfaces, and reshapes itself within those willing to remember. In an age increasingly threatened by cultural amnesia, Gularte’s poetry insists that remembrance itself is an act of resistance—that to remember is to resist erasure, and to speak is to keep entire worlds alive.

The title itself becomes the collection’s central metaphor. Black stone. Basalt. The volcanic foundation upon which the Azores rose from the Atlantic. Stone that remembers fire. Stone that survives storms. Stone that carries within it the memory of creation itself.

From that stone, Lara Gularte has fashioned something equally enduring. Not monuments. Not memoir. Poetry.

Poetry capable of carrying an entire people across oceans without ever allowing them to disappear.

In an age increasingly forgetful of origins, Soul of Black Stone reminds us that memory remains one of literature’s most radical acts. It teaches us that homeland is not diminished by migration but multiplied through imagination. It reminds us that identity is neither inherited intact nor abandoned at the water’s edge—it is continually remade through language, memory, and love. But this is not simply a book about the Azores. It is a book about what the Azores became after the crossing.

It is about California’s dairies and vineyards, its orchards and fishing ports, its Holy Ghost halls and neighborhood churches, its ranches and university classrooms, its poets and laborers, its grandmothers who carried Portuguese in their voices long after their villages had disappeared beyond the horizon. It is about generations born beneath the California sun who nevertheless discovered that somewhere beneath their feet lay the echo of volcanic stone.

For every Californian of Azorean ancestry, these poems offer more than recognition; they offer continuity. They affirm that the Atlantic did not sever history—it extended it. That Flores, Pico, Faial, São Jorge, Terceira, São Miguel, Graciosa, Santa Maria and Corvo continue to breathe within California’s cultural landscape—not as relics of immigration, but as living presences shaping language, imagination, family, memory, and belonging.

Yet Lara Gularte’s achievement reaches even further. Her poetry speaks to every community born of migration, every family whose history crossed an ocean, every reader who has searched the past in order to understand the present. She transforms the Azorean experience into something unmistakably universal, demonstrating that the deepest local truths often become the widest human ones.

The ocean, after all, never forgets. Neither does poetry.

And in Lara Gularte’s luminous hands, the black stone of the Azores becomes something larger than geography, larger even than ancestry. It becomes the enduring voice of an entire diaspora—stretching from the nine islands across California and throughout the Portuguese world—a testament that heritage is never merely remembered, but continually recreated by each generation willing to listen, to imagine, and to sing.

That is the lasting gift of Soul of Black Stone. It gives the Azores another magnificent poetic voice. It gives the Portuguese diaspora one of its defining literary works. And it gives California—whose history cannot be told without the labor, dreams, faith, and imagination of generations of Azorean descendants—a book that finally matches the depth of that remarkable inheritance.

Like the volcanic stone from which its title is born, this collection will endure: weathered by time, illuminated by memory, and destined to become part of the enduring literary landscape of both the Azores and the Portuguese diaspora for generations to come.

Diniz Borges for Filamentos-Bruma Publications

You can order the book here in the US and Canada through Bruma…