Song of Emerging Homeland and other poems

Natália Correia (1923-1993) was a surrealist poet and proud Azorean. Her erotically-charged, nature-loving poetry brims full of lush imagery drawn from her volcanic island homeland—a dream-like space from which she could speak, with illuminating insights, from the margins of Portuguese culture. Correia spent her whole life as a vocal opponent of patriarchal authority, under Salazar’s New State dictatorship. Within Portugal today, she is remembered as a cultural agitator, writer, left-wing politician, and champion of human rights (especially women’s), and her provocative, diva-like public persona and image has perennially scandalised conservative mores.

This anthology, which brings Correia’s poetic oeuvre to Anglophone audiences for the first time, conveys the breadth and inventiveness of her work, tracking the development, over time, of her eco-matriarchal utopianism. In particular, the ‘Song of Emerging Homeland’ (1961) and the ‘Motherland’ poems (1967) communicate her yearning for the overthrowal of patriarchy and an ensuant liberation of repressed feminine energies, sounding a clarion call for women’s bodily autonomy. This woman-centred philosophy went hand-in-hand with her green politics, and we have the pleasure of presenting her to you as a relevant and pioneering eco-feminist poet for our own environmentally-troubled era.