Tempo Obtuso

Between the see and the feel, a world of very light impressions comes out, and of them the poetry of João Nicolau is made. One could say, perhaps, that the "very slight impressions" are filters between the substrate of real and the imaginary, and directions that the poet's existence imprint at their intersection.



This movement to bring from the bottom, this tide of impressions form, in my view, one of the characteristics of the poet´s work: the images float, there are huge spaces of reading, it is poetry of traces, of rubrics, as mark of “the butterfly on moon silhouette".



In all poems is perceived a shading, a covered, retained, contained, a dark semi tint that allows the passage of "obtuse time" as fermentation time of worlds that mix. Regarding this "dark" says Nicolau: "... dark times decrease the distance between ... / originally lonely thoughts".



And when worlds are mixed up, it will appear what does not belong to any, that is, is new, the vague figure, the ghost, the double that obliges the poet to declare: "I see myself living isolated in another corner; I run behind my wanderer feet".



And the "living in another corner", which is the double showing up, brings to the surface "voices that hear" whose discourse hides, for example, in the malicious geometry of the "Diagonal face’s” woman, the "colors of her underwear."



The "voices that hear" both build hope, despite any desire, as suffering for knowing herself dreaming, of the first poem, as when they articulate the faces of the monotony in the "blue color of the world slowness”; in the beauty which is a trickle on the same point ", formulating perceptions which point to a "simple organism” or "pigs that speak”, pigs who dream?



Between the chorus, the inner voices and the real observable, the poet creates the "humanly profane resonance" of the poetic word that allows us to penetrate the richness of the Obtuse Time.



And riches are the endless opportunities for the reader set their reading paths when you start, which will be always, a long journey around the poem, around the reticent and cloudy sceneries of the beautiful poems of João Nicolau.





Sonia Guedes do Nascimento Leal

Master's degree in Communication and Semiotics by PUC.

PHD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature by USP.

And currently professor at UNIVAP in Literature.