Mrs. Silva Walks to the Azores: A Story in Ten Cantos / A Sra. Silva caminha para os Açores Uma História em Dez Cantos by Michael Bickford – Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

Using vivid imagery, Michael Bickford masterfully weaves together a compelling story of aging, memory, loss and diaspora as his neighbor, Mrs. Silva, walks through “green slopes alive with people she once knew”. The braiding of English and Portuguese widens the terrain, as the poem steps between time and place – “She strides the azure seas, the continents, island jewels, their lava-red reflected in her fiery eyes.” The writer is an intimate witness—“I saw her swarthy face through the window and knew she would be holding the Sunday paper, plastic bagged, dripping last night’s rain.” Mrs. Silva Walks to the Azores  is a love story, an honoring of generations, of  neighborhood, and of resilience—“those who show the way to the end of the block, to the wild.”

—Susan Dambroff, author of Conversations with Trees and A Chair Keeps the Floor Down, Finishing Line Press

“Giving full focus to an unlikely hero in his ode to both humanity and the author’s terrain, Michael Bickford sings the beauty of sheer reality with Nerudan devotion and dexterity.  Mrs. Silva’s rural neighborhood walks are revealed as perseverance, reflecting the immigrant’s journey from eternal home to a new land.  The gorgeous Portuguese translation extends Bickford’s shimmering language in relation to his exploration of how diasporas connect and intertwine our cultures.”

—Zev Levinson, author of Song of Six Rivers and The Sauntering

“In Mrs. Silva Walks to the Azores—a daily walk a neighbor takes during the pandemic—Michael Bickford presents a rich and complex portrait of Mrs. Silva, her history, her movement between her native Portuguese and her adopted English, and the landscape she moves through. Through a cycle of ten cantos, the narrative eye moves ever deeper into the textures and layers of her life, the language shifting from English to Portuguese mid-line and becoming ever richer in its observations, intuitions, and speculations about the days of her life. This canto cycle is full of love and hope, a rich and marvelous tableau that in the end is about us as much as it is Mrs. Silva.”
—David Holper, inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Eureka and author of Language Lessons: A Linguistic Hejira

The love, beauty and respect Michael demonstrates for aging and cultural diversity with Mrs. Silva Walks to the Azores is contagious. Michael’s shared experience of Mrs. Silva turns out to be one we all end up striving for. With Mrs. Silva Walks to the Azores, we momentarily get to experience those feelings and consequently become ever more charged with a poetic energy that feeds our own Walk.

—Dr. John Heckel, Theater Arts Professor Emeritus, Humboldt State University