From the dust jacket: 'Until very recently, Portugal tended to be dismissed as England's oldest ally or simply to be added to the list of tourist paradises as "Europe's best-kept secret". This cosy image was shattered in April 1974 when a group of young army officers overthrew a dictatorship which had survived for forty-eight years in a bloodless coup which came to be called the Revolution of the Flowers, with the red carnation as its symbol.'In the Introduction to this first major anthology of contemporary Portuguese poetry to be published in England, Helder Macedo, Professor of Portuguese at the University of London, relates the poetry of the last forty years to Portugal's political development and describes the variety and challenge of a tradition which has been touched again and again by history. The work of thirty eight poets is featured-poets both from Portugal itself and from some of the African colonies. Much of the verse is overtly or covertly political. But not all. There is a rich lyric vein which many of the poems in this volume illustrate; and there is an experimental tradition, which relates to the international Concrete Poetry movement as well as to the more radical experiments of Modernist origin, in particular that witty surrealism which has been developed to such effect both in the Portuguese and the Spanish language literatures. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.