English Poems, Volume 02 (of 2)

Fernando Pessoa wrote in English with the same mastery he brought to his native Portuguese, and this second volume of his English poems reveals a poet who understood that identity is a performance, that the self is multiple, that every voice we inhabit becomes its own truth. The collection includes works like "Epithalamium," a meditation on the joy and terror of commitment, but ranges far beyond romance into the existential vertigo that made Pessoa one of the twentieth century's most radical thinkers. Here you will find love poems of startling tenderness, poems of philosophical inquiry, poems that disassemble the speaking self as casually as one might change clothes. What emerges is a portrait of an artist who could not stop inventing himself, whose English voice carries the same electrifying strangeness as his Portuguese heteronyms. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever felt that they contain multitudes.