Cattle of the Lord

“To have faith in god is to know/ that nothing is suffered in vain,” writes celebrated Portuguese poet Branco in this plaintive, lyric collection—her first to be translated into English. In a world marked by pain and death, Branco’s poems whisper to the earth and cry out to the heavens, seeking faith and joy. The troublesome blessing and burden of being human is the collection’s central theme. “In any language the verb to be/ ends always at the slaughterhouse,” she writes. The intersection of carnality and spirituality leads Branco to seek solace in the sacredness of sex. “And since he made us with a touch/ I touch you, too, with this caress,” she writes, “Blessed be he who loves like that.” She empathetically appeals to a god who shares our human concerns: “If you don’t save yourself/ from your own death, even though you are/ also god, if you die in our name/ and go on dying of us, all we can do/ is celebrate this life.” Presented in a dual-language format, Branco’s thoughtful collection looks to a shared future and offers a solution for the present: “on the coldest nights we rub our bones together/ and lie there watching stars spark from the two of us.” (Dec.)