Saudade: Thirty Poems of Longing

Review
Elizabeth Varadan's first book of poetry, Saudade, Thirty Poems of Longing, is aptly named. The first saudade speaks eloquently of longing as "a yearning for what was, what could have been but was stillborn" and later in another poem she relates that in saudade there are no returns nor arrivals. In this book, Portugal, a country she loves becomes a place we know as she brings us poems of fado--like the blues. She speaks eloquently of our troubled land and of loss echoing my sadness for America. The four saudades in this book frame a lovely unity. Phantoms of promise in the third bring us to a place of keeping the heart dormant so that in the fourth we learn to trust again. This first book is a beautiful read, not to be missed.
--Allegra Jostad Silberstein, Poet Laureate for the city of Davis 2010-2012
In Saudade, Thirty Poems of Longing, Elizabeth Varadan reckons with an untranslatable Portuguese word, the title of this exquisite chapbook, in order to evoke a universal emotion: longing for what was lost, missing, never fully known, never truly experienced. Music, poetry, and travel offer her poignant glimpses of this evanescent but irrepressible condition, which comes close to love but escapes, sometimes into the thin air of memory. Yet once saudade has been evoked, other emotions emerge in Varadan's poems: nostalgia, terror, sorrow, dread, and hope all appear and fade into a muted acceptance of fate. What lingers is the haunting echo of the fado, the quintessentially Portuguese blues that Varadan too sings, quietly, and with perfect phrasing.
--Bradley W. Buchanan, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, California
State University, Sacramento
In this short, cohesive collection, Elizabeth Varadan steeps us in saudade, that peculiarly Portuguese feeling of regretful longing, and we emerge, ironically and gratefully, more hopeful for the immersion.
--Naomi J. Williams, Author of Landfalls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2015)