She collects them one by one / black stones on a black beach / and wonders if her future / can be lived out of the past.
—Lara Gularte, Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time
I first wrote about Lara Gularte’s poetry many years ago, particularly her early collections Kissing the Bee and Fourth World Woman. That she stands today among the finest poets of the Portuguese-American diaspora is now unequivocally affirmed by this magnificent volume, jointly published by Bruma Publications and Letras Lavadas. Diniz Borges has accomplished what few among us managed to achieve in previous decades, never forgetting the pioneering Luso-American publishing endeavors that began with the still-living Gávea-Brown project—first through its landmark journal, founded in 1980, and soon afterward through the publication of Azorean and diaspora books in both Portuguese and English. The work undertaken over the past few years through the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, is nothing short of monumental, almost unparalleled in North America, bringing together institutions such as Letras Lavadas, the Azores’ foremost publishing house. This introduction serves to situate what is unfolding among us today. “The territory is not the map,” Simone de Beauvoir once observed, in words later invoked by the great poet Emanuel Jorge Botelho. It is, above all, a confirmation of the grandeur of the literature emerging from the islands and the diaspora in two languages; literature born in the most distant geographies, written by first and succeeding generations raised far from their ancestral homeland, yet whose themes and memories have never abandoned us, nor ever will. Lara Gularte is a writer who steadfastly inhabits this centuries-old inheritance of journeys both outward and inward. Such a phenomenon may not be unique among descendants of many immigrant peoples, yet since the second half of the twentieth century it has become, in the Azorean case, an extraordinary act of persistence and artistic excellence. The Azores possess a dual literary history: one Portuguese, the other American. To deny this reality would be to deny ourselves.
It is Lara Gularte’s poetry that concerns me here. Soul of Black Stone contains new poems while also gathering carefully chosen works from her earlier collections, pieces that fit seamlessly into this continuing literary voyage of memory. Yet the book accomplishes something even greater. It imaginatively resurrects those who came before her, generations stretching from the nineteenth century to her own never-forgotten condition as a fourth-generation Azorean American. Hers is a poetry that transforms longing for ancestors she never knew into living presence, while simultaneously reviving those closest to her own familial and communal bloodline. Her poetry is as profoundly American as it is Portuguese. She revisits the islands as she revisits the broader American landscape. This is not the naïve nationalism of romantic mythmaking; rather, it is the discovery of history itself, carrying her across the Atlantic toward the intertwined roots of joy and sorrow. Lara Gularte does not write elegies for lost lives. Instead, she confronts herself, allowing imagination to endure beyond what she believes to be the factual boundaries of her own existence—indeed, of our shared existence, forever suspended between reality and soul. She refuses to dwell exclusively in the present. She summons everything she remembers—or imagines remembering—standing beside a grave or in the presence of the islands from which her forebears departed so many generations ago: Flores, Pico, Faial. Only through this act of return does she rediscover herself. In telling her own story, she reminds us all who we once were and who we continue to be. Her encounter with her own hybrid identity is not an exercise in nostalgia; it is an act of continual self-reconstruction, an identity endlessly redefined by the shifting landscapes of memory, emotion, and imagination, forever negotiating between a distant ancestral past and a daily life that never truly escapes those faraway origins. Soul of Black Stone is therefore a poetry of both happiness and grief, of those who never personally knew this inheritance yet were never forgotten in life or in death. She knows her history, just as she knows—deeply and intimately—the geography from which her people departed and the destiny they forged across a vast continent where they tilled the soil, tended livestock, sought gold, and eventually died with the quiet dignity of lives fulfilled.
Again and again, Lara Gularte transforms poetry into a return voyage toward the Azorean islands that define her imagination. She turns our natural landscape into metaphor—not for catastrophe, but for living memory, where beauty itself becomes the emblem of a people whose lives have been marked alike by joy and suffering. The sea surrounding the Azores is not the menace we sometimes perceive it to be; it is the courageous passage through which our destiny was shaped. Even in Lisbon she recognizes the resilience of the people to whom she belongs. It may be found within a cathedral, along the banks of the Tagus from which we once sailed to remake an entire world, or in the homage paid to those who offered us another beginning far beyond an archipelago that belonged to no one when first discovered, yet where we would build a society destined to become something altogether new, adventurous, and enduring. She claims that history as her own, and in doing so claims it for all of us—the astonishing journey from nothingness to the fullness of the present. For Lara Gularte, born in Northern California, the Azores remain home; its people are her people in two languages, suspended between islands and continents: “They go back down the road / the way they came / Here is home, they say.” There lies the return home—to the islands of her ancestry, to an identity perhaps impossible to define, yet paradoxically secure: that territory without a map, encompassing everything that has shaped multiple lives upon opposite shores of the sea, never truly divided, spoken in languages that have never stood in conflict.
Lara Gularte embraces every form of free verse. She writes poems of two lines and poems of expansive cadence, each sustained by words placed with unwavering precision. Quoting her is, for me, a difficult undertaking, so compelling is the force and inevitability of her language. I recognize myself within her poetry—in my own brief experience as an immigrant in California’s San Joaquin Valley, just as I recognize myself in the urban landscapes of greater Los Angeles and Orange County. I read myself in her because I read there the divided texture of my own life. I read myself in her during my most reflective hours. I read in her the story of my people, suspended between two linguistic loyalties and two national allegiances. Lara Gularte writes of our islands and of America exactly as I have lived—and continue to live—them, forever. She is not merely a poet speaking of herself. She speaks of me; she speaks of our people; she speaks of our history. Like a symphony, hers is the music of life’s exhilaration and its grief, of our uncertainties, our fears, and the quiet joy of rediscovery. Soul of Black Stone? Yes—the soul of existing simultaneously in the islands and in America. Even in the company of those who love us, there remains the solitude of those who have never known exile. That is Lara Gularte’s poetry. It walks beside us while reminding us that something essential will forever remain beyond our complete possession. Yet that absence is also part of who we are, and always shall be. We carry the whole of the past within us. It is the universal sentence from which no human being is exempt.
Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time is not simply an exceptional volume of poetry. It is a narrative that recounts part of the history of the Azores and of our simultaneously tender and arduous existence across both the islands and the Americas. Lara Gularte was born in California and has lived the entirety of her life’s journey in the land of her birth. Yet the Azores—and Portugal in its entirety—remain forever her homeland. Not through sentimentality, but through the profound consciousness and enduring knowledge of her own history, and of ours.
Vamberto Freitas, literary critic
Lara Gularte, Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time. Ponta Delgada: Bruma Publications/Letras Lavadas, 2026.
Originally published in BorderCrossings, Açoriano Oriental, July 10, 2026.
Translation by Diniz Borges
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