As cidades e a poesia na obra de Gilberto Mendonça Teles

Abstract

The reference to cities and countries is a recurring theme in the poetry of Gilberto Mendonça Teles. In undertaking the relationship between literature and the city in the author's work, this thesis examines the representations of cities, perceived in the game between the real and the imaginary. The city allows a reading that seeks to apprehend its broadest meanings by establishing the record of its history, whose spaces are seen and read as a book of urban culture. Conversely, the poem is the object of a gaze, whose first contact takes place in the process of seeing and not immediately in a deciphering. Like the city, the poem is a construction of visibilities. By looking at cities and countries, the poet constructs the poem and inserts them in an edification of words. To read the city-poem, to scrutinize this space and its structures, is to travel a poetic and literary itinerary, through experience and imagination. The way of seeing and reading the city impregnates in itself the exercise of perception, with an attentive gaze to observe and identify its particularities. This reading happens in the practice of a look that captures and distinguishes clues, that collects from space and time prominences and represents them through poetic language.