ABSTRACT

Eugenio de Andrade's voice, through Alexis Levitin's, is passionate and at the same time soothing; it suggests a patience of an unusual kind and depth. In his discussion about death in The Art of Patience, Levitin quotes from de Andrade's poem "From Branch to Branch", wherein the blackbird is a metaphor and model for the poet. Many of de Andrade's poems, from the earliest to the last, also revive the corporal sensuality and mythic archetypes of the ancient Greco-Roman world, with Ulysses as a recurrent figure whose shadow guides the poet. Placing the body, as opposed to the mind or the "soul", in the forefront of human sensibility implies praising whatever sensations allow him to leave behind hindering constraints, doubts, self-restraint, or even reason itself. In any event, one short poem from de Andrade's Another Name for Earth is especially compelling in that the poet's responsibility to "name" is not relinquished.