Tag Archives: Human Relationships

Poem “After” by Brazilian Poet Martha Medeiros

18 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in Brazil, Poetry

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Brazilian Poet Martha Medeiros
Photo Credit: Martha Medeiros Official Facebook Page

My Poetry Corner September 2022 features the poem “After” (Depois) by Brazilian poet, journalist, and chronicler Martha Medeiros, born in 1961 in Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southern State of Rio Grande do Sul. With more than thirty books published, many of which have been adapted for theater, TV, and the cinema, she has become one of the most read and respected writers in Brazil.

In the 1980s, after graduating in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Medeiros started out as a copywriter and content creator in advertising and marketing. Her debut poetry collection Strip-Tease, published in 1985, received great success. Over the next sixteen years, ending in 2001, she published five more books of poetry. Her favored themes were love, lovelessness, and relationships.

In the poem “The measuring tape of love,” she concludes: It’s not height, weight, or muscles that make a person great. / It’s their immeasurable sensitivity.

The extensive list in the poem “What is the purpose of a relationship?” includes:

A relationship has to serve you in feeling 100% comfortable with the other person…
To teach one to trust, to respect the differences that exist between people…
A relationship has to serve for one to forgive the weaknesses of the other…
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“Unwritten Poem” – Poem by Barbados’ First Poet Laureate Esther Phillips

06 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by in Poetry

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minister of culture appoints poet esther phillips as barbados' first poet laureate - february 2018

Minister of Culture appoints Poet Esther Phillips as Barbados’ first Poet Laureate – February 2018
Photo Credit: Barbados Government Information Services

 

My Poetry Corner January 2019 features the poem “Unwritten Poem” from the poetry collection, The Stone Gatherer, by Esther Phillips, a poet and educator born in Barbados, where she still resides. In February 2018, she was appointed the first Poet Laureate of the Caribbean island-nation.

After attending the Barbados Community College at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, she won a James Michener fellowship to the University of Miami where, in 1999, she gained an MFA degree in Creative Writing. Her poetry collection/thesis won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

In 2001, she won the leading Barbadian Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award. Years later, the third of her three well-received poetry collections, Leaving Atlantis (2015), won the Governor General’s Award for Literary Excellence.

Phillips is a Sunday columnist of the Nation newspaper and editor of Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, a 2007 revival of the seminal Caribbean literary and arts magazine, first published in 1942. In 2012, she formed Writers Ink Inc. and, together with its members, the Bim Literary Festival & Book Fair. Continue reading →