The image of an
engineer designing a
building, an epithet Melo Neto himself adopted, is often used to describe his poetry. From the start, his poetry was extraordinarily rich in imagery. Commenting
Pedra do Sono, his first book,
Antonio Candido, who noted his debt to
cubism and
surrealism, observed how his poems were composed from the accumulation of concrete and sensory images, using words in an almost pictorial manner. Quickly, however, he proved highly attentive to the social reality of his state. In
O cão sem plumas (“A Dog without Feathers”)’, his first long poem, dated from 1950, he portrayed the lives of the destitute classes, who depended on the
Capibaribe River, and described the toiling of the sugar-cane mill. Three years later, in
O Rio (“The River”) he assumed the voice of the river, narrating in first-person its course and the villages and landscapes it crossed. Clarifying his debts to Melo Neto,
Augusto de Campos has said: “One might say that he has no antecedents in Brazilian poetry, but his work has consequences. It is Concrete poetry that will sustain, continue, expand and broaden this poetic language that is not sentimental, but objective, a poetry of concretude, a critical poetry, as João's poetry is.” ==Works==