Review by Booklist Review
Italy's best-known modern poets, including the Nobel laureates Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, are the hermeticists whose unornamented, elliptical, and very personal poetry can be dauntingly obscure. Pozzi (1912^-38), whose work came to light after her suicide, wrote in the hermetic manner, but as translator Venuti points out, American readers may find Pozzi a kindred spirit to Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Lorine Niedecker. She set her poems in terrain familiar to her: Milan and the pastures, villages, peaks, and lakes of the Dolomite Alps, to which she, the only child of wealthy bourgeois parents, frequently traveled. She was supremely intelligent, unlucky in love (her father forbade marriage to her great love, a teacher 16 years her senior), and increasingly what we now call socially conscious. In her poems, she charges sharp natural and realist imagery with the emotions roused by her experiences. She doesn't specify what emotions precisely, counting instead on sensual evocation and active verbs to register longing, frustration, excitement, and other passions. A few letters conclude this dual-language edition. Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
