It was a joke. Actually, he rode
Into town with a typewriter,
Back in the ’70s.Na verdade era uma brincadeira.
Ele foi até à cidade com uma máquina de escrever
nos idos dos anos 70.— Sam Pereira, Code Blue
Let us begin here. It marked the opening of an utterly original literary career, one thematically divided yet profoundly unified within the landscape of American literature, where Sam Pereira’s singular experience would ultimately converge with the finest writing of his native country while remaining, almost invariably, in dialogue with the literature of his Portuguese ancestry, particularly that of the Azores.
It was not out of mere curiosity that, some years ago, I reviewed in these pages his poetry collection simply entitled The Marriage of the Portuguese, without further explanation. My fascination with his work was immediate upon reading that volume, among so many others he has written. My return to his most recent collection, Code Blue: New & Selected Poems, therefore became inevitable. In doing so, I was leaping over many of the books he had published in the United States in the intervening years, yet now I found myself revisiting both familiar and newly written poems, the work of a poet who has reached full artistic and personal maturity, as a colleague in California—who has remained in close contact with him—recently remarked to me. This new volume has now appeared through Bruma Publications and Letras Lavadas, publishers whose vision has expanded to embrace writers from some of the most significant literary geographies that are also, historically, our own.
Sam Pereira was born in 1949 and has lived, for most of his life, I believe, in Los Banos, one of the small towns of California’s San Joaquin Valley. It is the very same town where another of our poets and novelists, Alfred Lewis (Alfredo Luís), once made his home after emigrating from Flores Island. He was perhaps the first Azorean immigrant to publish a novel—Home Is an Island—with the distinguished Random House, a work praised in the pages of The New York Times during the 1950s. It was later translated in Portugal by Rui Zink, though without receiving the critical attention it deserved. A loss, indeed, for Portuguese readers.
These words, however, are first and foremost an appreciation of the poetry of Sam Pereira, who remains largely unknown in the land of his forebears, despite being a poet who continually “travels” between America and the ancient homeland that belongs both to his ancestors and to us all.
Code Blue: New & Selected Poems is written in a language at once exquisitely sophisticated and disarmingly direct, intensely personal yet richly ironic about the life of the distinguished poet who is Sam Pereira. He pursued his undergraduate studies at California State University, Fresno, where he studied under the Anglo-American poet Philip Levine, then a member of the faculty and, to this day, regarded as one of the most celebrated and widely read voices in American poetry. Pereira later earned his master’s degree at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I mention these details for those among us who so often speak of our diaspora while still holding only an abstract notion of who we are—and who we have become—beyond the borders of the homeland.
Sam Pereira invites us to read a poet whose verses recall the life of a gentle bohemian: a smoker in the old Portuguese manner, never neglecting the quiet companionship of a glass of wine, though always with measured restraint. Each poem assumes its own distinctive shape, yet all remain chapters in the narrative of a life perpetually in transit, carrying us toward those moments when we are together or utterly alone.
From one nocturnal gathering to another, from chance encounters and convivial evenings, he quickly broadens his gaze to embrace the larger human community with which he identifies. The poems move effortlessly from memories of youthful revelry—of music and songs that stirred him deeply—to the rural world of his parents and grandparents. From there, his imagination turns toward islands of longing and adventure, places we never quite know whether he truly inhabited or merely dreamed into existence, as in the remarkable poem “Hemingway in Angra.” It could well be a fado belonging to any generation among us: love and farewell, surrealism and an experience that never occurred, yet might have, if only we suspend, for the duration of the poem, the fragile boundary separating truth from pure invention.
His lexicon may appear deceptively simple or, at times, deliberately elusive, but its meaning ultimately rests upon the reader’s own capacity for discovery. No reader should feel abandoned within these poems. His tributes to other poets recur throughout the collection, yet never at the expense of his own unmistakable originality. Such is the case with “Give Me a Carton of Edna Millays,” inspired by one of the many brief romances of the formidable literary critic Edmund Wilson in New York—a wry and playful gesture toward mid-twentieth-century America as it entered the fullness of its literary and cultural modernity across the ocean.
Sam Pereira stands among the earliest modernist Portuguese-American poets to have sustained a lifelong literary vocation within our California diaspora. I say our diaspora because, although he is wholly American, he has never forgotten his Portuguese forebears. The same is true of Frank X. Gaspar, Katherine Vaz, and Carlo Matos, among others, as well as more recent writers whose work I have not yet had the opportunity to read.
Thirty-five years in the Azores have not made me distant from them. Literature, after all, lives through forms of proximity that are as profoundly human as they are geographical. Fortunately, today’s means of communication have begun to dissolve these distances. Though I have never met Sam Pereira in person, it now feels as though we have spoken every day. Such is the power of his writing; such is his return to the world that belongs equally to those who remained there and those who departed, a world carried in the soul and memory of every immigrant and perpetuated by generations of Luso-descendants.
This is what great—indeed, truly great—literature accomplishes, whatever its form.
There is in this volume a prose poem entitled “Letter to St. John in the Style of Richard Hugo” that confirms Pereira’s almost astonishing ability to speak of life and death, those eternal companions of all who, like myself, have reached the later years of existence.
Sam Pereira also possesses another quality shared by the world’s finest poets and writers. On the surface, his language may at first seem opaque, his verses resistant to immediate interpretation. Yet they gradually seduce us with a beauty that becomes luminous: the beauty of memory—once more the memory of years and places lived or merely contemplated—and of that existential condition which reveals itself through the anxiety of remaining alive while fully conscious of what has been and, inevitably, of what shall one day be.
I laughed—perhaps I should have wept—while reading “Tragic Cigarettes.” I know precisely what he is speaking of, though not in any tragic sense. Rather, it is a consciousness akin to listening to one of Frank Sinatra’s existential songs, whose voice Sam Pereira appears to admire as deeply as I do.
Here, then, is poetry in its highest form, existing in harmony with the greatest achievements of every other art. He dedicates certain poems—at least one of them—to a dear mutual friend. The epigraph to this review comes from the poem “The Outlaw, Sam Pereira.” The freedom to call ourselves by the style of our own lives is among the bravest of acts; or perhaps it is simply the refusal to pretend to lives other than the one we have been given.
Such is the voice of a poet who both narrates and confronts us.
His homeland, in the heart of California’s great interior valley, was destined to be cultivated—not only by the plow, but by song, by memory, and by literature itself, as so many others have done before him. These are the voices of minorities that ultimately define our identity, our history, and once again the story of our endless journeys in search of everything and, with profound irony, of nothing.
The poetry of Sam Pereira is that higher artistic mode through which we come to recognize our own destiny—a destiny that has never truly been divided.
Vamberto Freitas, Literary Critic (Translated by Diniz Borges)
Sam Pereira, Code Blue: New & Selected Poems. Ponta Delgada: Bruma Publications / Letras Lavadas, 2026.
In the Azores, Madeira, Mainland Portugal, or any country of the European Union, you can get it directly from Letras Lavadas:
https://www.letraslavadas.pt/code-blue-new-selected-poems
