Eye of the Island

Poet, activist, educator, lawyer and diplomat, Corsino Fortes (1933-2015) was Cape Verde's ambassador to Portugal and Angola. Writing in Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese, his first collection was published to great acclaim in 1974, the year Portugal’s Estado Novo regime collapsed, leading to the decolonisation of Cape Verde and other African colonies in 1975. 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. This is a wider selection of this seminal poet's work, translated by Daniel Hahn with the poet Sean O'Brien.