“This is why real poetry does not grow old; and why we need it. It is the language of feeling. The great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935), said it was his custom, to think with the emotions and feel with the mind (text 131 The Book of Disquiet) and in another entry (298) he marvellously dramatises the psyche of the creative writer, one caught up by life so totally that a ride on a streetcar, leading him to experience vicariously the lives of passengers, clothes, their factories, workers, ‘managers trying to stay calm’, their private lives, The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me - on the nape of a dark-skinned neck whose other side has I don’t know what face - I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress. (p. 290) and from that, the loves, secrets, souls of all who helped make the dress; and then the seats in the tram take him to distant places, workers, houses, lives, realities, everything … so that, I get off the streetcar dazed and exhausted. I’ve just lived all of life.”

- Desmond Egan