Disdaining personal revelation and sentimental vision, the poems of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999) present squalor, desperation and injustice without comment or obvious compassion. Other poems pay homage to such subjects as chewing gum and aspirin. What interests Cabral, as he remarked in his acceptance speech for the 1992 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, is "the exploration of the materiality of words," the "rigorous construction of . . . lucid objects of language." His poetry, hard as stone and light as air, is like no other.