Don Share’s poetry resume reads like something from another era, when men and women of letters were perhaps more common.
Not the tenure-track kind of poet one finds in universities, but the sort that is actively engaged in poetry – as an editor, as a translator, a critic, and as a writer – on a daily basis. He was poetry editor of Harvard Review, the Partisan Review, and a senior editor of Poetry magazine.
He’s published three books of his own poems, translated Seneca and Miguel Hernandez, and compiled two books of verse by the great Basil Bunting, as well as co-editing The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of “Poetry” Magazine.
Share’s own poems are pithy, witty, and verbally gymnastic. Occasionally he takes a pun or a rhyme a little too far until it snaps back or more likely turns inside out. He’s fascinated by words and how they transform each other in the music of varying line length and tone.
And he is always aware, as poet Tom Sleigh writes in a blurb for Wishbone, Share’s latest collection, “of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness.”
The title poem, “Wishbone,” Share said in an interview, “is in the voice of a dying cat, and from his perspective, human beings are in charge, making godlike decisions in the face of which he feels powerless, though this is a tough cat and he suffers no loss of nobility or character even at the very end of it all. Needless to say, a cat can’t talk; I wanted to give one language for a short spell so he could speak his piece. A bit of tragicomic relief, you might say.”
Here is Don Share’s poem “Wishbone”:
I have a bone to pick
with whoever runs this joint.
I don’t much like
being stuck out in the rain
just to feed on the occasional
vole or baby rabbit
and these wet weed-salads
confound my intestines.
A cat can’t throw himself
into the Des Plaines River,
not even in the luscious fall.
I get yelled at in human
language every single day
for things I can’t begin
to comprehend, let alone change.
But I go on cleaning myself –
why shouldn’t I? –
and so I think I smell sweet,
even though I suspect otherwise.
I wouldn’t harm a fly normally,
but why doesn’t anybody
take care of me? How am I
supposed to know that it’s Easter,
that I’m not allowed to die
in my own bed, and that neither prong
of this wishbone is meant for me?
–Don Share
Eastern Redbud Tree (Cercis canadensis) blossoms - photo © Valerie Reneé
on Flickr - noncommercial use permitted with attribution / no derivative works
The Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) is one of my favorite trees. Native to eastern North America from southern Ontario to northern Florida, the redbud is an early harbinger of spring.
Also known as the “Judas tree,” it is among the first to bloom. In my experience, it flowers before the cherries and magnolias in the mid-Atlantic.
The redbud is easily recognizable from its showy, magenta to fuchsia-pink flowers appearing in clusters from March to May. Rather than bursting out of the ends of branches, however, the redbud’s flowers seem to “break out” on bare stems before the leaves and sometimes on the trunk itself.
The flowers are pollinated by long-tongued bees such as blueberry bees, carpenter bees and mining or miner bees.
Calvin, my pitbull, is no stranger to my readers and friends. I’ve written about him before and he had quite a few followers on my Twitter account (@greenskeptic) where I often post pictures of him.
Calvin in the Wissahickon
My poem, “Redbud & Pitbull,” originated from a scene I witnessed sitting on the porch of my former house two years ago. The redbud I had planted there a few years back had still produced no flowers.
I was curious about this fact and about the frenetic activity of the mining bees, which should have been pollinating the redbud, because both seemed to be indicative of my life at the time. I was simultaneously unsettled and not yet ready to flower.
What a difference a few years makes: the redbud flowered for the first time this year — and what glorious flowers have bloomed in my life!
Here is my poem, “Redbud & Pitbull”:
The mining bees are emerging.
Males zipping around
tiny holes in the ground
where females are burrowing
beneath the redbud.
The males have a curious display;
more manic than romantic,
expecting a mate to think crazy
is sexy or superior.
I guess we all
fall prey to a little crazy
love now and again,
do something foolish,
cross a line or two.
But the bees flying too close
to the ground are just frantic,
can’t imagine they’d make
suitable mates.
They course and dive and zip
(yes, that’s the best word for it, zip),
while females wait below the redbud.
My pitbull Calvin watches
the mining bees swirling
above and into the ground
beneath the redbud. He thinks,
Who or what are these (things)
buzzing and drilling in the dirt?
Truth is, the mining bees
–neither food nor friend—
pay him little interest.
Now Calvin grows bored,
slopes over to the sidewalk
flopping down in the sun.
The redbud’s waxy leaves
glisten in the same sun,
green edging into red.
Calvin is mottled, piebald,
brindle and white with a big brown
eye patch that makes people smile.
He’s a lover, not a fighter.
He cares little why the redbud’s shock
of fuchsia flowers, like scales or
a rash running up the limbs hasn’t shown.
He has no word for flowers
and little time for bees.
–Scott Edward Anderson
P.S. This poem, along with “Calvin’s Story,” appeared in Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology, published by Salmon Press. If you love dogs and poetry, you must have this book – it makes a great Mother’s Day gift too!
Alison Hawthorne Deming and raccoon cub.
I love when poetry shows up in unexpected places.
The Poetry Society of America and the MTA recently revived their “Poetry in Motion” program on the New York City subways.
The Clint Eastwood Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler, written by poet Matthew Dickman, is another example.
“The Language of Conservation,” a Poets House project that provides residencies for poets in zoos around the country, is still another.
So I was thrilled when American Scientist magazine published my friend Alison Hawthorne Deming‘s poem “Mosquitoes” in a recent issue.
Alison lives in the Tucson desert and draws inspiration from the natural world there, her native New England, as well as Grand Manan Island, Canada, where she has a family home, the Everglades, Alaska — really, wherever she is.
Her work has long been concerned with the relationship between art and science — her first book was titled Science & Other Poems — and the science of looking at the world. So her appearance in a scientific magazine is not really a surprise, but the fact that the magazine publishes poetry at all is to be celebrated.
Alison’s books include the poetry collection Rope (Penguin, 2009) and the essay collection The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998). She is coeditor of The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, revised edition 2011).
Formerly director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Alison teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona and also serves as chair of the board of directors for Orion magazine. She recently completed a new nonfiction book titled Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit.
Whether writing about individual species (The Monarchs), entire ecosystems, or the human despoilment of nature, Alison trains a scientist’s eye on her subjects. Yet, she’s not afraid to add a little wry humor into the mix.
“Mosquitoes” offers an enlightened victim’s view of this annoying insect, prompting us to appreciate its singleness of purpose and a reciprocity with which most of us would rather not comply.
Here is Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Mosquitoes”:
First came the scouts who felt our sweat in the air
and understood our need to make a sacrifice.
We were so large and burdened with all we had carried,
our blood too rich for our own good. They understood
that we could give what they needed and never miss it.
Then came the throng encircling our heads like acoustic haloes
droning with the me-me-me of appetite. We understood
their pleasure to find such hairless beasts so easy to open and drink.
We understood their female ardor to breed and how little
they had to go on considering the protein required to make
their million-fold eggs. Vibrant, available, and hot,
we gave our flesh in selfless service to their future.
— Alison Hawthorne Deming
Frederick Seidel at home in New York, 2009. Photo by Antonin Kratochovil/Vii
Poet Michael Hofmann, in his entertaining review of Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009
Hofmann draws comparisons with V.S. Naipaul and quotes from a new biography of that author saying the two are purveyors of “picong, a Trinidadian term, ‘from the French piquant, meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener is sent reeling.’”
The New York Times called Seidel the “Laureate of the Louche,” which is to say simultaneously rakish and appealing. He is a poet with a penchant for the most expensive hotels, bespoke suits, handmade shoes, and Italian racing bikes – of the motor kind, not pedaling – and a strange, nearly fatal attraction to all that is dark and violent and decadent.
One is never quite sure if Seidel is putting it on – does he really do the things he says in his poems or is it all a persona? Is he playing with the reader the way he plays with form, with lines, with puns, with rhyme? That is to say, masterfully.
“Convinced life is meaningless, / I lack the courage of my conviction,” Seidel wrote in an early poem, “After the Party,” but then opens two poems – “Racer” and “Fog” — with the same line: “I spend most of my time not dying./ That’s what living is for.
Seidel’s poetry burns with a fury matched only by the leatherclad poet hitting 120 MPH on his custom-built Ducati. He takes a perverse pleasure in imagining his own fiery death, which hasn’t come; the poet turned 76 this year.
Take these lines from “A Gallop to Farewell,” quoted by Hoffmann:
The most underrated pleasure in the world is the takeoff
Of the Concorde and putting off the crash
Of the world’s most beautiful old supersonic plane,
with no survivors,
In an explosion of champagne.
Readers and critics either love or hate Seidel. There is no middle ground. But he couldn’t care less. He’s never taught or sought tenure or prizes or even a “career” in poetry, which is kind of an oxymoron anyway. He studied with Robert Lowell, but shook off his teacher’s influence pretty early on and hasn’t been associated with any poetry “movement.”
And while Seidel’s first book came out in 1963, he blossomed late, with 17 years between his first and second collection and 10 books published over the past two decades, culminating in his 500-page, 50 years worth of poems, which is the best of poetry I’ve read in a long time. What I mean by that is Seidel’s POEMS does what William Styron said a good book should: it leaves you slightly exhausted at the end because you lived several lives while reading it.
Here is Frederick Seidel’s “Fog”:
I spend most of my time not dying.
That’s what living is for.
I climb on a motorcycle.
I climb on a cloud and rain.
I climb on a woman I love.
I repeat my themes.
Here I am in Bologna again.
Here I go again.
Here I go again, getting happier and happier.
I climb on a log
Torpedoing toward the falls
Basically, it sticks out of me.
At the factory,
The racer being built for me
Is not ready, but is getting deadly.
I am here to see it being born.
It is snowing in Milan, the TV says.
They close one airport, then both.
The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.
He buzzes me through three layers of security
To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department
Where I will breathe my last.
Trains are delayed.
The Florence sky is falling snow.
Tonight in Bologna is fog.
This afternoon, there it was,
With all the mechanics who are making it around it.
It stood on a sort of altar.
I stood in a sort of fog.
Taking digital photographs of my death.
–Frederick Seidel
Juvenilia: “Snow Sleeping November”
November 19, 2011
Painting by Lisa Hess Hesselgrave, November 2002
JUVENILIA
1: compositions produced in the artist’s or author’s youth
2: artistic or literary compositions suited to or designed for the young
Origin of JUVENILIALatin, neuter plural of juvenilisFirst Known Use: 1622
As the Wikipedia entry for Juvenilia explains: “the term was first used in 1622 in George Wither‘s poetry collection Ivvenilia. Later, other notable poets, such as John Dryden and Alfred Lord Tennyson came to use the term for collections of their early poetry. Jane Austen‘s earlier literary works are also known by the name of Juvenilia. An exception to retrospective publication is Leigh Hunt’s collection Juvenilia, first published when he was still in his teens.”
One of my earliest extant poems, written when I was 15, came to my attention recently. The poem is called “Snow Sleeping November.” I was surprised by its language and resonance, although some of it seems over-written and bears too heavy an influence of Whitman, Frost, Hopkins, and perhaps Stephen Crane.
I can still see the cabin in New York’s Finger Lakes that provided its inspiration.
Here is my poem,
“Snow Sleeping November”
I realize the briskness of this November eve,
the quiet, complacency of stiff snow,
the darkness of full‑breasted snowclouds,
all of us retaining warmth
like soapstone.
My cup is full of hot water
the wood in the fire
gleams like cat’s eyes & gives-off a
sun‑like warmth‑‑radiant, welcoming.
Short days & long, frozen nights,
girding my boots
for the crisp winterchill,
wind driving drafts up my nose.
The sparkling, icy water
and trees stiff in the dead weight
of snow‑leaden branches.
Poets crawling at the clouds
pulling snow groundfast‑‑
Those November trees!
–Scott Edward Anderson
The painting is a sketch by my friend Lisa Hess Hesselgrave from my personal collection. You can see more work by Lisa at LisaHesselgrave.com
Calvin as we found him, October 2009
My pitbull Calvin was adopted a year and a half ago from the PSPCA.
When we asked about his story, we heard a horrible tale of abuse and abandonment followed by rescue and recovery and, ultimately, his second chance.
I composed a poem out of Calvin’s story for Jessie Lendennie’s wonderful book, Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology,![""](http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=1907056505&camp=217145&creative=399349")
Here is my poem,
“Calvin’s Story”
“Make it stop, make it stop,”
was all I kept thinking;
my eyes closed, some
bully biting my body, limbs,
tearing flesh and hair—
Boys pinned me to the pavement,
each one holding a leg, holding
me down on my back.
Another boy – so there were 5?
–pressing the bully into me
head lashing at anything
it could grab with canines.
I’m surprised I didn’t black out—
Then, I remember a scuffle.
I was almost unconscious,
drifting in an out—
Two men freed my limbs,
but still I couldn’t move.
One chased the boys
while the other lifted me,
cradled me, into a van.
I’ll never forget the smell
–camphor, maybe, almost
lavender, medicinal.
The gentle one dabbed my
wounds with a wet cloth,
stroked me slowly, dabbed
–there was a lot of blood;
were there sirens? I don’t
remember sirens. (Should
there have been sirens?)
The next thing I remember
is being on a cold, metal
table – a nurse or doctor
looking me over – another
shaking her head. The first
mumbles something (all I hear
is “Dog,” that word they have
for us), then I’m sure she said,
“This one’s a keeper, let’s give
him a second chance…”
I wake in a crate, damp towel
beneath me, head swirling.
I must be in the “pound,”
there are others barking.
(I wish they would be quiet;
my head hurts.) Then
the pretty nurse or doctor
comes in, mumbles to me;
I look up, try to smile
(this seems to please her),
and I slip in and out of sleep.
Months later,
I’m sitting on a street corner,
leashed, with some of the nice pound
people. A lot of people pass by,
they pat my head, mumble
in that way they do, until one
couple lingers (a child or two
are with them, I can’t recall).
They mumble to the pound people;
one of them (Alpha, I’ll call him)
walks me; he has a firm hand,
but is gentle, in control.
Oh how I wish for a forever
family…but I don’t
want to get my hopes up.
Then, the day is over,
back to the pound – sigh –
guess it wasn’t meant to be.
Next night, however, there
is Alpha, and he’s brought
some others. (Oh, let me be
on best behavior so they will
take me home.) They seem
to like when I snuggle, listen,
take commands, lick the cute
young ones – they are salty sweet!
Days go by after that night,
the pound people tell me
to get ready. Maybe, just maybe,
this is a good sign. Oh, I get so
excited my butt wiggles faster and
faster. Finally, the day comes;
Alpha arrives with the others,
and I think, This is it. I’m going home
with my forever family…to a home;
home at last for my second chance.
–Scott Edward Anderson
On “Bread” and Baking
March 18, 2011
Sourdough Loaves
I love baking bread and pizza. I make my own dough and everything is done by hand — from the starter to the kneading and shaping.
Back in the late 1980s, I contemplated going to apprentice with the famous French boulanger, Lionel Poilâne. I still fantasize about opening a bakery/pizzeria.
My good friend Mark Herrera, who lives in San Francisco, also loves to bake bread. We often swapped recipes and shared stories of our bread baking. Once he shared with me a starter that had been in his family for years.
I loved the idea of sharing starter over a long distance and this idea became the starting point for a poem called, “Bread,” which was published in the journal Earth’s Daughters in 1999. Here is my poem,
“Bread”
“Christ may have risen all at once, the gospel according to Betty Crocker seems to say, but flour and yeast and people made of dust require successive chances to reach their stature” —Garret Keizer
He takes the bread from the oven, pausing
midway between the bread board and cooling rack,
absorbing the gluteny scent through crusty skin
–the color of a child’s arm
after a long hike on a summer’s day.
She says, “I have a marvelous sourdough starter,
passed on to me from a cousin who ran a bakery–
I can bring it to you.”
One pinch of starter travels two-thousand miles,
five hours through adventure, through altitude,
the acrid odor filling the cabin of the plane.
“It makes a bread that Jesus would be proud to call body.”
“Just a pinch?” she asks. “How can you deny me?”
She says that not to let her test it is tantamount to lack of love.
He gives in, just to see her face grow sanguine and lustful.
He once baked thirteen loaves for a homeless shelter;
then, nervous over numerology, he baked a fourteenth.
He couldn’t remember which one had been the offending loaf,
so he started all over again. This time he scored each one
with a distinguishing mark using the blade of a sharp knife.
In the bread bowl, he mixes flour, water, salt.
Kneads, lets it ferment. Kneads again, pulling and folding,
folding and pulling, lets it come into fullness.
Then lifts it into the oven, from where it will emerge
so finely crusted, so evenly textured, so giving of itself.
Bread that cries, when placed in her mouth,
“Eat me and you will never die.”
–Scott Edward Anderson, Earth’s Daughters, Issue 54, 1999
My poem “Crow’s Rosary”
December 28, 2010
The author in Hoboken, 1988
Keeping with the bird theme, a Tweet by Juliet Wilson reminded me of an old poem of mine written in 1987, when I was part of the Hoboken, NJ, poetry scene. It was published in the journal Chalk Circle in 1989, when I was one of a group of writers known as “The Decompositionalists.”
“Crow’s Rosary” was about the changes that were happening in Hoboken at the time, and the clash of cultures that continued thereafter as the mix of ethnicity and artists gave way to gentrification. No doubt it is a very different place today.
Here is my poem
Crow’s Rosary
Hoboken again after so long gone, yet the gregarious scent of coffee lingers;
the ka-chung, ka-choong of the old furnaces is replaced by the dolorous
buttoning of starched white collars–
Tinderbox matchbooks, this town harbors a legacy of fire–
a last-resort for some to stem the tide of condo-conversion.
The siren-scourge filling the air once filled by shipyard steam.
One crow equals one square mile in this mile-square-city and that lone crow
follows me from rooftop to steeple, from apartment to train depot,
end to end and back again–“Carrion waiting, carrion waiting!” he cawcries.
Somewhere on the cobblestone Court Street, he stops–
the garbage piled high in the alleyway.
Resuming flight, his feathers soiled by ashes, carrion of this
melting pot boiling over too high a flame–his rosary chanted-out above
the rooftops; church bells echo the litany of the displaced, “Carry on waiting.”
“I’ll die in your rosary,” sighs the Hoboken muse. “So carry on waiting.”
The Hoboken muse, the wife, dressed in black even in the heat of summer,
soothes the dusky sky.
The hammer’s hammer harkens: “Make way! Make way for the new tide that
rises above the din and dun! A new sleep is upon us!”
No morning comes without the hammer’s calling for work to be done;
another home displaced in Hoboken. They never cease except for
the obligatory coffee break taken 10 minutes after waking us all up.
A peregrine falcon rests on our laundry pole out back,
starling-eyed–showing us the underside of our breadwinning days,
challenging us to use those drear, found things.
The litany of lonesomeness leaves nothing left for the crow’s rosary
to be counted on. In the weepdusk, he cries in a deafening crowd,
“Carry on waiting, carrion. Carrion waiting!”
The curry-garlic-jalapeño-covered walls and streets now come
prepackaged, processed for microwaves and barbecues–
I see, in my eros-dreaminess, your suppliant flesh
resting on the tar beach; feel the embrace that comes
when our flesh conjugates a verb–
while the crow, soaring alone, surveys the tumult of our disheveled days.
This is a ghost of Hoboken–and I am to carry on with my waiting,
carry on as the crow with his lonesome rosary.
Who has the time to let the coffee steep, to savor the “last drop?”
And what does this new Hoboken mean to us, so unlike what it was to us?
Altar-clouds rise above us, an endless stream of
forgetting and rising, forgetting and rising,
linked by the crow’s rosary, the litany of lonesomeness.
There’s a gibbous moon out back, illuminating the night kitchen.
“Thee sees we love our garden,” says the Hoboken muse. “Let me assure you:
tho’ it may be only clapboards and clay pots now, its future is ardorous bounty…”
We live in shells cast aside by others, hollow bodies awaiting obsolescence.
Knowing this, the streets seem more calamitous.
Knowing this, we set-about preparing the earth’s redeeming.
Now you come to me with your chalice of hopelessness:
We are never so alone as when we long for lost things.
—Scott Edward Anderson, Chalk Circle 1989
Ground Zero: Trying to Write About 9/11
September 11, 2010
In the wake of tragedy on September 11, 2001 — in the face of it, in some ways — there were reports of poems appearing all over New York. On lampposts, bus stops, phone booths, taped over advertisements; poems to lost loved ones, the missing, the dead, to the world.
Poetry seemed to be a healing force for some, a way of calling out in remembrance for others. Poems then started to appear in print, as poets from Deborah Garrison to Wisława Szymborska tried to come to grips with what had happened that day.
I tried to write a poem to express what I felt about that day. I wasn’t there, I was 100 miles away in Philadelphia, but some people I love were there and their lives were forever changed by the tragedy. All of us were.
I started writing the poem that November and worked on it for a while before giving up. It wasn’t easy to write about. I took it out again six years later and found it wanting. I was reminded of the poem today — nine years after the tragedy — and decided to share it here.
Here is my poem, “Ground Zero”:
Neighbors worked in these buildings;
buildings no longer there, no longer here.
Their emptiness fills the space once occupied.
How tall is emptiness?
How empty is remembrance?
Memory flares, burns out.
Neighbors are strangers become familiars,
and neighborhoods are the places we meet
the stranger’s glance, acknowledge or turn away.
Only now, who can turn away?
Who can pretend innocence?
Decoy repelling and attracting.
The boy in Belfast on his way to school
who runs past the empty spaces
between houses, fearing snipers;
the girl who fears an ill-timed car bomb;
the mother awaiting children from the playground;
the father fearing policeman protecting and serving.
Neighbors may be those we’d least like
to live with, but they make our community.
The empty space left by buildings gone.
Our hearts wanting for lack of something,
connection, community, solace–
Who can fill the space gone empty, gone?
(for Barbara Einzig & Chloe Indigo Hannah Guss)
–Scott Edward Anderson
On Saudade and Longing: Two Poems
August 26, 2010
Have you ever felt a deep longing for something or someone? Someone from your past, perhaps, or a place or time for which you feel an intense, nostalgic yearning.
There’s a wonderful word in Portuguese that describes this feeling: “Saudade,” which some define as a “feeling of incompleteness…due to the absence of someone or something…or the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived.”
It can be very intense and somewhat hard to decipher. You know when you feel it, however — and when you got it bad. I’ve tried to describe it in two poems over the years; although one could argue it is a consistent theme in much of my poetry. (Perhaps it’s my Portuguese heritage?)
The first poem is called “Saudade,” and it was published in the literary journal Kimera in 2001:
Saudade
I feel beliefs that I do not hold.
I am ravished by passions I repudiate.
–Fernando Pessoa
We’re surrounded by people
who sentimentalize collegiate life,
swoon over first marriages,
would kill to return to Rome, or
wish for the restitution of days
gone by, or worse, days
they’ve never known.
(The Portuguese have a word for it,
saudade, a longing for lost things.)
For myself, I have fond memories
of houses in New England
(where my childhood
blossomed, disappeared);
of a life of the mind,
of places for a brief time mine.
But the only thing I long for
is the old cherry tree,
in front of our home
— we were newly wed —
how it dashed its branches
against our roof.
##
The second poem, “Longing,” is from my poetic sequence called “Dwelling,” which a poet friend of mine has described as “a phenomenology of how we live on the Earth.” This is the first time it has appeared anywhere (not for lack of trying!):
Longing
“Love is the distance
between you and what you love
what you love is your fate”
–Frank Bidart
Desire is a city street flush with longing;
losing is the darkness inhabiting that street.
Say that losing becomes a way of knowing,
words failing to capture its music–
Desire is to longing as longing is to losing.
If this is so, losing strengthens longing
as longing makes mystery of desire.
Concave mirrors cascading light in common focus
each reflecting and magnifying the other,
unformed or uninformed, but nevertheless–
Life’s little endings: the big unresolved, unrequited
unfolding of the world into what longing desires.
##
I’m not sure which poem is more successful at capturing that intensity of feeling and persistent yearning or desire. (Well, obviously, someone thought “Saudade” caught it better, for it found its way into print.)
Frankly, I’m not sure the word saudade can ever really be described in English; we just have to feel it to understand it.
What do you feel saudades about?
–Scott Edward Anderson
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