António Silva Pinto

Poet. He spent his childhood in Beira Baixa and Alto Alentejo. He graduated in Germanic Philology and was a secondary school teacher in Lisbon. He contributed to A Planície (Moura), D. Quixote (Évora), Distrito de Portalegre, Rabeca and A Cidade (Portalegre), Beira Baixa and Reconquista (Castelo Branco), Concelho de Mação, Jornal de Notícias, and Coordenada (Porto). He is represented in the anthology Poetas Alentejanos do Séc. XX. His debut book, in 1957, reveals two fundamental lines of force: an uninhibited Whitmanian-inspired free verse in the first part, and the search for maximum metaphorical concentration, suggested by Noh theatre, in the dramatic poem that constitutes the second part. In subsequently published books, the discourse becomes oblique, labyrinthine, and what was a clear pagan vision dissolves into doubt and indeterminacy, in the form of fragments that, amidst the arrangement and disarrangement of language, record the impossible reconstruction of a lost unity.