How are the concepts of travel and time linked, and what is their reflection on time and space displacement, and therefore also their poetic dimension? In fact, these parameters are what we define as the concept of place and sense of place, and what it has to do with our memory, and the perception of time, as past and present. Poetry, as thought, pure serenity or path, as Heidegger wrote, is basically the aggregation of these topics, to develop them into a single idea, a path, the only one, by which we reach our destiny, leaving our memory in all popular places that we slowly pass by. A path that is not the path of information, of entertainment, but of austerity, of knowledge.
The project is part of the subtheme Re-imagining identity through poetry.
Author
Rui Cóias
Rui Cóias was born in Lisbon. He graduated in Law from the University of Coimbra, has a postgraduate degree in Legal Sciences, he is a Jurist, and also studies Philosophy. He is a poet, essaysit and also translator.
He is the author of the books A Função do Geógrafo e A Ordem do Mundo. His last collection of poems Europa, includes, among others, a series of texts based on the Great War of 1914–1918, written on the occasion of a fellowship awarded by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. This is indeed the theme of his next book, which he is developing in the context of a new scholarship awarded by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. This book was recently published in Mexico (Las Márgenes Sombrias) and in Holland (Laat de stilte) with translations to Spanish and to Dutch.
Rui Cóias is also published in Belgium, La Nature de la Vie, and in France, L`ordre du monde — this publication, by L`Harmattan Publishing House, had a new improved edition in France in 2019.
He has also written essays. In his work, the distinctions between time and space, between the personal and the impersonal, are imprecise. In the background it is all a vast territory through which travel and travel in space and time establish connections with the landscape and memory, in a project of definition and naming of the intelligible world. Happiness, however uncertain, fleeting, is always within reach, or within our retreat, and we also, at all times, pursue the dark beauty of the world.
He has also published in several anthologies and publications in Portugal and abroad and presented his work in Spain, Macedonia, Switzerland, France, USA, India, Dubai, Serbia, Turkey and represented Portugal in several important festivals and literary meetings.
He is also part of the Portuguese authors that integrate the web platforms: Poetry International Web (Rotterdam), Poems from the Portuguese (Portugal) and Lyricline (Germany). He has a travel and literature blog, and lives in Lisbon.
During this year, an anthology of his poems will be published in Macedonia, translated into Macedonian, and his new book will be published in Portugal.
