The Art of Being a Tiger: Poems by Ana Luisa Amaral

Ana Luisa Amaral is considered to be one of the foremost Portuguese poets of her day, and although her poetry has been translated into many other languages, this is the first major collection of her poems to be published in English. Born in Oporto in 1956, and, for many years, Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Oporto, Ana Luisa Amaral published her first collection of poems, Minha Senhora de Que, in 1990, and has since published many more, along with plays, children’s literature, a novel and translations from English. Her work has brought her many prizes both in Portugal and elsewhere. Her poems are resolutely female, but she casts her net very wide in terms of subject matter, from tender poems about her daughter to thoughts provoked by finding a crumb lodged in the pages of a second-hand book to musings about Galileo, the theory of relativity and the larger themes of loneliness, loss, and death. She is a writer immersed in her own culture, but steeped, too, in the poetry, for example, of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, and in the world of the Bible and the Greek myths. The result is a poetry that takes equal pleasure in the physical and metaphysical, playing with words and ideas, a poetry that is always refreshingly oblique, taking the reader down unexpected intellectual and linguistic paths. Her poetry invites readers to share her own wonder and perplexity at life’s joys and griefs.