Published during the wave of escalation in the repression by the military dictatorship in 1969, Affonso Avila s Código de Minas and poesia anterior combines the vividness of vanguard poetic language with the semantic and critical play of the Baroque tradition. The purpose of the book is to uncover the substrates of the retrograde ideology of its time. In this sense, his poetry turns to a mode of artistic creation based on a fruitful reflection on history and politics. In his verses, the residuary fragments of mining society, baroque and contemporary, are seen as juxtaposed images of worlds in crisis open to the liberating remembrance. In this scheme, the past has a political dimension of unfinished and is updated through aesthetic procedures of articulation between the literary and historical dimension. By following the intellectual trajectory of this vanguard poet, the projects and the dialogues in which he participated, we try to construct reading and interpretation procedures for his poetry that allowed him to understand the essentials of his critical/literary project.