Saudade by Anna Citrino

I purchased Saudade because I’ve known Anna Citrino for thirty years; I loved the poetry because it’s exquisite. I read one poem each night for nineteen nights, savoring the poem like a fine port. At the end of each one, I felt as though I’d been taken on a journey and returned to the starting point with a fresh perspective. In “Into the Dark,” “We climb high up into the hills to peer through/the windows of a monastery, hoping to see/India’s highest mountain, Kachanzdonga.” It’s a magical trek, even if “clouds surround us.” We may not see the mountain, but the possibility is there for us, unlike for the person whose “kaleidoscopic color” is “lost now/to the gauze of blindness.”

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

I have always wanted a literature that, to me, brings the world inside. Happily, the poetry of Anna Citrino does exactly that: her writing embodies the world in the best way, with concrete, tangible images we feel we can touch, hear, and see vividly. When she observes that “[t]he Portugese created fado to hold the world’s longing,” I am enchanted to feel such waves of music rolling into my own existence. Her focus delves between fascination for the world and a deep responsibility to the world. For all of us who long for the world, this is a poetry that well provides.

–Nicholas Samaras

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Anna Citrino’s poems are exquisitely beautiful! Her poems show us clearly the beauty, as well as the broken, on the dusty streets of Delhi and elsewhere around the world. Anna insists on looking, and not turning her gaze away, until the poem transforms her and our experience. Her poems fill us with longing for a world made whole again.

–Georgia Heard

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

“I want to write a poem / like a lightning bolt,” begins Anna Citrino‘s “The Poem I Want to Write.” No such ordinary—and dare I say benign—phenonmenon as lightning could increase the impact of these subtle, penetrating poems. Lightning wishes it had the power of just one of Anna Citrino‘s images, or line breaks, or words. To read her work is to enter a world in which joy and sadness inhabit nearly every moment; to read her work is to become a citizen of this world. “We turn through the pages of time / and off we go each day to make our story, / paint our picture, lift our bricks, do our work,” she writes in “Seen and Heard.” With the poet Anna Citrino as our guide, off we go indeed.
–Jean LeBlanc

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]