Isabel Câmara

Isabel Câmara was born in Três Corações, Minas Gerais, in 1940. She became known for the playAs Moças, for which she received the Molière Award for best author in 1970, after the text was staged in São Paulo in 1969, directed by Maurice Vaneau, and, the following year, directed by Ivan de Albuquerque in Rio de Janeiro. According to critic Yan Michalski, "As Moças occupies an important place in the dramaturgy of its time, and reveals a singular sensibility, spontaneity of dialogue, an ability to envelop acute psychological observation in an aura of emotional poetry, and a talent that could, under other circumstances, have opened the way for the author to a more lasting career."

 

 During the 1970s, her friendship with authors such as Carlos Süssekind and Francisco Alvim brought her closer to the poets and writers active in Rio de Janeiro. Some of her poems were included in Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda's anthology,26 Poetas Hoje (1975), and part of her work would be collected in the volumeCoisas Coiós (Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 1998), from which the poems below were extracted.

 

 

 She was a contemporary of poets as distinct from each other as Orlando Parolini (1936 - 1991), Roberto Piva (1937 - 2010), Orides Fontela (1940 - 1998), Leonardo Fróes (b. 1941), Elisabeth Veiga (b. 1941), Paulo Leminski (1944 - 1989), Torquato Neto (1944 - 1972), and Ana Cristina Cesar (1952 - 1983), among many others who emerged between the 1960s and 1970s. For all these poetic works to be understood and evaluated by our generation, beyond the already rigid historiographical narratives about groups and hegemonies established in other contexts, it is necessary that they circulate, that they be available. With this small sample of poems by Isabel Câmara, as well as by other poets of those decades here atModo de Usar & Co., we try to participate in the process.

 

Isabel Câmara died in Goiânia in 2006.