Poem Of The Week - 'Fado' By Graham Mort

Near the top of the strange, many-layered red cake that is the Frederico de Freitas museum in Funchal is the star of a cluttered, eclectic show: a black bombazine dress and accoutrements whose provenance do not become clear without enquiry. Amongst the cornucopia of a lifetime's collection - Dr de Freitas was a lawyer, businessman and frantic hoarder of historical and artistic curios - is a 'shrine' to Amália Rodrigues, Portuguese Fadista, and national musical heroine, who died in 1996.

'Why is Amália's dress black ?', I asked the Madeiran curator - to the untrained eye, it resembled Queen Victoria's 'widow's weeds'. 'Because Fado is very sad', she said, cheerfully.

And It is possible to locate an interpretation of Fado in inconsistency of sentiment and demeanour: Fado, from the Latin Fatum, loosely means 'fate', and from that resoundingly simple word emerges a Portuguese folk music tradition, a theatre of the life of the poor whose lament still ranges out across the bars of Lisbon in multiform melisma, making, in a perfect metaphor for a recording of bittersweet experience, 'calligraphies of air'.

The great skill of Graham Mort's poem is to capture the essence of Fado in a synaesthesia of homage. In five octets which rise and fall in metrical length as though to inscribe the emotional intensity of the music they represent, Mort invents a picaresque world of lost love, resignation and melancholic introspection. That world is sometimes Illyrian in shape, traversing a border between real and fantastical versions of reality, but the poet's sincere love for this uniquely personal form is clear in the rhythmical journey he takes.

Meandering through a colourful landscape of human existence at the extremity, Mort describes the inherence of contradiction to that condition in oxymorons: 'a frail bridge / where we imagine beautiful / incestuous orphans bathe / in fallen peonies.' And later, immersing the reader in a scene of despair, 'lovers' farewells linger as / rancorous applause'.

The intense metaphorical development of the second stanza releases a sanguine and persuasive rendering of the meaning of Fado. An emotional intuition as much as a musical revelation, existential recognition is yielded up in the colour of blood and wine, in heart-ache as 'clotted' as the densest of constellations, and extruded through the 'press' of solitary tears.

The poet's trans-historical ramble is an Orlando-reverie - each experience accreting to condense in a final intaglio, an engraved inscription on cloth, acting, here, as a definition of the losses, the farewells, the pain and the pleas of the centuries.

It is fitting that a poet's self-evident affection for this art form should conclude with a prospective invocation to lament the ending of a relationship in Fado's concupiscent light.

'    its teeth clenched
in ecstasy, its cruel but
vital waste of breath.'

Here is an affirmation of life: its desires and intermingled brutalities, the intense and close embrace of a Tango.

'Fado' is taken from Graham Mort's Black Shiver Moss, and is published by Seren.