Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana
A poem of the moment /Um poema do momento
"One can be born on an island in two ways,” wrote the poet and novelist Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. “From the body of a woman or from the radiance of sensibility.” In this book-length poem, Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana, award-winning poet Scott Edward Anderson explores the nature of what it’s like to be born from that radiance of sensibility of his ancestral islands. Using autobiographical elements as well as quotations from Azorean poets, scientists, and naturalists, Anderson extends the limits of personal history and expands the poet’s emotional journey.
As Anderson writes in his introduction, “Frankly, this poet’s emotional journey has become that of a love affair between the Azores and me, and this work serves as just a piece of that story…” The poem appears in its entirety here for the first time, in its original English and translated into Portuguese by the author and Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto, with José Francisco Costa. Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana also serves as a tribute to Azorean poets, emigrants, and those whose diasporic and ancestral ties bind them to the islands in passionate and tangible ways.
ORDER NOW:
North America: New Bedford Whaling Museum* or Direct
EU: Letras Lavadas
*portion of proceeds goes to Whaling Museum
Praise for Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana
“Azorean Suite: A poem of the moment is of an originality that I believe is unmatched among us.”
— Vamberto Freitas, review in Açoriano Oriental
“Azorean Suite is Scott Edward Anderson’s journey to the homeland of his heart in search of the inner serenity, the desired peace we all aspire to reach on this earth, the longing for a past he never had, saudades of what the poet never experienced but desires to achieve.”
— Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, author of Tales from the Tenth Island
“This Azorean Suite: A poem of the moment is not a book of this hour, not even a story of today. It grasps the deepness of the islands from their past, storms it mightily through the present and echoes our senses into the future.”
– Almeida Maia, author of Ilha-América
“The epic is the poem of return, a story of ancestors and, above all, the longing for a land – an island – where the poet knows that something awaits him. Reading Azorean Suite, all these pieces come together, like a puzzle, and we watch this battle unfold for the memory that brings back the family names, the scenarios once lost, the journeys that led to the exile of anonymous heroes to whom Scott Edward Anderson returns their names, and the endless adventure of a cross-emigration with exile. In this beautiful poem, the epic is in that fight against forgetfulness and in the reconciliation of a distant heir with a past that the poet recovers, in a current time that brings new and unexpected threats to humanity. Poetry is perhaps the best way to fight these threats, and this book gives us a celebration of life on each of its pages.”
— Nuno Júdice, award-winning poet, essayist, and novelist
“Cantabrigian dictionaries would begin to define the word suite as a piece of music that consists of a set of related parts. So is, quite aptly, Scott Edward Anderson’s epic and nostalgic poem. Can one feel nostalgia for the ancestral unknown? Can one cross both the blood in the underflow and the ocean itself, and feel rooted in the past of others, of the ones who came before? These are the themes and parts that compose Anderson’s musical piece. These are the bars and notes that navigate the poet in the voyage that is Azorean Suite.”
— João Pedro Porto, author of Pássaros de Poente /Birds of Dusk
“It is so good to read science in the way it is presented in Azorean Suite — in the service of the meaning of life and, in this specific case, poetry as a means of understanding the island world. Only in this way does doing science make sense. Science is for serving! I love the way the poem traverses the sense of identity in time and space, unfolding the being in several selves that extend and intersect. I think it’s incredible that [Anderson] manages to play so deeply in what is the Azorean, having, on top of that, been born and lived his whole life outside the Azores.”
– Celina Vale, investigadora do CEHu da Universidade dos Açores