The Eye of the Island / O Olho Da Ilha by Corsino Fortes, translated by Daniel Hahn and Sean O'Brien PRE-ORDER
Published March 2025. Available for pre-order.
Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was born on Cape Verde's São Vicente Island. Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Fortes was Cape Verde's ambassador to both Portugal and Angola, and served as a judge in Angola. Writing in both Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, Fortes was as interested in poetic form and sonic possibility as he was in the cultural identity, history, and movements of the Cape Verdean archipelago. His first collection, Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year of the collapse of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which led to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Throughout his career Corsino Fortes's poems offer vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country - word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body. The PTC first published Corsino Fortes in 2008, a short chapbook with poems translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O'Brien. Corsino also visited the UK as part of our early World Poet Tours. Following his death in 2015, we are very pleased to present a wider selection of this seminal poet's work as part of the PTC's World Poet Series. The collection included here is a subset of a 'selected poems' published by Archipelago Books in 2013, with a new introduction by Daniel Hahn and a commissioned afterword essay (poet to be announced).
Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was born on Cape Verde's São Vicente Island. Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Fortes was Cape Verde's ambassador to both Portugal and Angola, and served as a judge in Angola. Writing in both Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, Fortes was as interested in poetic form and sonic possibility as he was in the cultural identity, history, and movements of the Cape Verdean archipelago. His first collection, Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme), was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year of the collapse of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, which led to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. Throughout his career Corsino Fortes's poems offer vivid and often hallucinatory glimpses of the land, sea and people of his country - word-scapes rooted in the earth and the body. The PTC first published Corsino Fortes in 2008, a short chapbook with poems translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O'Brien. Corsino also visited the UK as part of our early World Poet Tours. Following his death in 2015, we are very pleased to present a wider selection of this seminal poet's work as part of the PTC's World Poet Series. The collection included here is a subset of a 'selected poems' published by Archipelago Books in 2013, with a new introduction by Daniel Hahn and a commissioned afterword essay (poet to be announced).

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