MILO De ANGELIS ~

 

Form

The mystery of what another man

sees

at the fall of a dress

separate sense

from the name "stefania."

Assassins

Where the move

to be here demands an undiscoverable

choice, sacred wait, season:

the shadows, in the listening,

at the edges of the face

stop in the solemnity

dividing dagger

from act.

Neither Point Nor Line

Like the drop, on the leaf, after the storm

only for the second time

he never knew anymore

because he wanted to be precise

till death

light zen, in the field,

the force that held the birds in flight

(an interruption and they would fall)

becomes the hell of counting them.

And The the Water

In the harvest too

the body was only lent

because it wanted to become

innocent in the end

and running

it didn't renounce

an anthology of gestures

the slender body

entering the princess's room

to love the first time.

Now she is unadorned

Now she is unadorned

and the years come to pass, in handfuls,

with the wit of shears and

an arrogance that draws

to the gas the mouth

persistent down to the spine

where it believes

or else the dead trudge toward a field

with a hollow head

and the myriads

hurl themselves into the baptism

for a breath.

_________________________

Milo De Angelis

Finite Intuition

Selected Poetry and Prose

Sun and Moon Press, 1995

AMELIA ROSSELLI ~

 

IN THE NORDIC

palm grove of deconsecrated churches,

forced laughter

the city in the palm,

charred life

YOU CAN'T WITHSTAND this winter

modestly

that innocent mud

and with shoes in hand

and naked you cross

that square,

traveling across squares.

LERMON HILL: IMPECCABLE

solitude! imbued with light

I am tonight: not dark

the green estate or ecstatic

the violet march towards

vendetta . . .

THE YOUNG, THEIR roses

akin to you: the young

their roses, akin

to me: the young, their

faults, akin to ours

YOUR WHITE HANDS

forgiving complaints of the poor

or forcing complaints

I play mute bells.

ROSES TIDIED UP

forgettable loneliness

meticulous farmer

best in the world

recognizing yourself as a tank

of covert nullity

spent crushing

death solitude

all the more valuable

if thinly I'm marble.

I'VE REMOVED EACH light

downplayed your spring

his combing his hair.

That indifferent land

and where are you,

born with science.

Seeing myself written on the walls

I crossed the islet.

OUT OF TUNE life,

it blows itself out

hope is plucked

hard to piece itself together

wants nothing to do with it

thoughts are oval then, or opaque.

ONCE THE GOAL is achieved

little refuge in my candid sky

splendid unused sun

our life shivering

with borrowed dismay

if he doesn't speed up I'll compete.

______________________________________

Amelia Rosselli

Document

translated from the Italian by

Roberta Antognini & Deborah Woodard

World Poetry, 2025

MARIO DELL' ARCO ~

 Spiral Staircase

    In search of a bawdy shade

of blue, without the slightest wisp of cloud,

stair by stair ascend.

I've stumbled, by spiral's end,

out of this world and into heaven.

The Apple

    One last apple among the leaves

of the highest branch, the sweetest.

The pickers must've missed it.

No matter — only I

can reach that high.

Watermelon

    A man carves watermelons

beneath the green shade

of the vendor's stand.

Dozens of half-moons

    make moonlight red.

Star Hunter

    Forget about thrushes, quails,

woodcocks! I'm out hunting

stars with a butterfly net.

Undecided between Orion,

Vega, and Scorpio, I bet

on the Herdsman, Bootes.

    At dawn I return empty-handed,

net burnt to a crisp.

I Built A Wall

    It's my fault.  Stone by stone

by stone I built a wall,

walled myself off from the world.

    No way out now.

Even if I wanted to

feel your hand, one

step and I'd crack

my head on that wall.

Sunflower

    Bright yellow in a field of green,

face to face with the sky,

holding its breath, calls it a day.

    Not even the sun, for all its art,

can purge night from the sunflower's heart.

___________________________

Mario dell' Arco

Day Lasts Forever

World Poetry, 2024

translated from Romanesco by Marc Di Martino

EUGENIO MONTALE ~

 

Times at Bellosguardo

Oh now there in the glittering

stretch that bends toward the hills

the hum of evening lessens

and the trees chat with the hackneyed

murmur of the sand; and how this common life

no longer owned by our breath

gets channeled there, crystalline,

into orders of columns

and willows at the edges

and great moats in the gardens

by the overbrimming pools,

and how a sapphire light returns

for the men who live down there: it is too sad

such peace should enlighten in glimmers

and everything then roll on, with intermittent

flashes over the steaming riverbends,

with intersecting chimneys

and shouts from the hanging gardens

and consternation and long laughter

over patched roofs, among the arrases

of massed branches and a brilliant tail

that trails across the sky before

desire can find the words!

____________________

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)

Poems

translated by Jonathan Galassi

Everyman 2012

RE-READING FERRUCCIO BRUGNARO ~

 

We Don't Want Bosses, Period

We don't want bosses of any kind,

                                 period.

They've already splashed around

                       in our blood,

already feasted plenty

                              on our lives.

Stop asking us so many questions.

Look at our injuries

             the damage done to peasants

                                    and miners.

We've gotta yank this plant out of the world

                           once and for always.

Don't ask anything else of us. We've really

                                  made up our guts.

We don't want bosses

because they're

                           the same as ever;

because they want the land

                    all for themselves,

because they never stop

                   robbing, trampling

and killing, killing

day and night under every kind of sky.

_________________________

translated by Jack Hirschman from the Italian

Ferruccio Brugnaro

FIST OF SUN

Curbstone Press, 1998

Ferruccio Brugnaro worked for 30 years —

most of his adult life — in an industrial park of

chemical factories in the Porto Marghera district of Venice.

Well known as a worker-poet he shared his poems for years,

printed in mimeo format, to workers at the factory and in many

schools he visited. Poet & translator Jack Hirschman chose for this

collection from three previous books by Brugnaro: We Must Want To,

 The Silence Doesn't Rule and The Clear Stars of These Nights.

Born in Mestre Italy in 1936, Ferruccio Brugnaro has retired from

the factory shift and now devotes his full-time to writing.

[ BA ]

John Martone ~ David Maria Turoldo

 

David Maria Turoldo

"O My Senses"

translated by John Martone

Longhouse 

2021

$12

signed by John Martone

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RE-READING GIOVANNI PASCOLI ~

Birthplace



Dream of a summer day.



Limitless cicadas

trilled and quivered.

Wind from the north

whipped crumpled leaves

through a line of trees.



Sun fell between elms

in strips of dust:

From the sky, two clouds

hung threadbare:

white brushed



across wide blue air.



Tamarisk shrubs,

pomegranate trees, the far

throb of a threshing machine

and the silvery swell

of the evening call to prayer. . .



Where was I? The bell

for the prayer said where,

in tears, while a dog

bayed at a stranger

who walked by, head bowed.





_________________
Giovanni Pascoli
Selected Poems
translated by Taije Silverman with
Marina Della Putta Johnston
Princeton 2019 






Tell me you don't have the outdoors circulating through you

PRIMO LEVI ~

In the Beginning



Fellow humans, to whom a year is a long time,

A century a venerable goal,

Struggling for your bread,

Tired, fretful, tricked, sick lost:

Listen, and may it be mockery and consolation.

Twenty billion years before now,

Brilliant, soaring in space and time,

There was a ball of flame, solitary, eternal,

Our common father and our executioner,

It exploded, and every change began.

Even now the thin echo of this one reverse catastrophe

Resounds from the farthest reaches.

From that one spasm everything was born:

The same abyss that enfolds and challenges us,

The same time that spawns and defeats us,

Everything anyone has ever thought,

The eyes of every woman we have loved,

Suns by the thousands

And this hand that writes.

13 August 1970






__________________________

Primo Levi
Collected Poems
translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann
Faber & Faber

POET ~

Translated from the Italian

 by Jamie McKendrick

There's a moment when the body

gathers itself in breathing

and thought stops and hesitates.

Likewise things

tugged by the moon

undergo the influence of

the tidal sigh, the malleable eclipse.

And the boats' planks

swell gently in water.





=






Summertime, like the cinemas, I shut up shop.

Thought flies off elsewhere and evaporates.

Billboards write white,

the air's warm,

the table weighted with fruit.





=






Often the page lies becalmed.

It's futile turning it to find

what quarter the wind

might blow from.

Nothing moves.

Thought wavers in that calm.

What navigation wrecked

is there, being

painfully repaired.







Fibonacci



I note the forehead's curvature

in its utter nakedness

and deduce the same number

that underwrites

how branches grow,

a church's poised facade,

the snail-shell spiral,

and the form of leaves.




 =




I should like, one day,

to be turned to marble,

to be stripped of nerves,

glistening tendons, veins.

Just to be airy enamel,

slaked lime, the striped

tunic of a wind

ground to a halt.




=




On the beach, rotten wood, tires, bottles,

sodden stuff — all things wrecked

and putrified — I love them all:

what's washed up, spewed out, good-for-nothing,

what no one wants

to have or filch.

In April the air

takes on a hint of warmth.

Glows like a cheek.




=




This writing's being worn away,

its angles smoothed, the "r"s,

the "m"s, are turned

and sanded down and roll like stones

the currents shift from shore to shore.

Faces also,

faces waste away

from the pressure of being watched.

They turn into a landscape

full of ruins.






Games: Rebus



A world without time.

Without a breeze.

Everything is still

and exhaustingly full of meaning.

There's no end of meaning and sheer slog

in this worksite of sense.

Every word is a gravelly roadbed

of letters and figures.

Everything weighs a ton.




________________

Valerio Magrelli
Vanishing Point
Farrar Straus Giroux

LEOPARDI ~

L'Infinito / Infinitive


I've always loved this lonesome hill

And this hedge that hides

The entire horizon, almost, from sight.

But sitting here in a daydream, I picture

The boundless spaces away out there, silences

Deeper than human silence, an unfathomable high

In which my heart is hardly a beat

From fear. And hearing the wind

Rush rustling through these bushes,

I pit its speech against infinite silence —

And a notion of eternity floats to mind,

And the dead seasons, and the season

Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So

In this immensity my thoughts all drown,

And it's easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

translated by Eamon Grennan


————————————
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
Selected Poems
Princeton University 1997

AMELIA ROSSELLI ~

Stretched out on the ground I stabbed my best friend. But
business stayed what it was. I picked up my best friend
and he gave me no end of grief, light in the ears
that wouldn't be scandalized. The great glory
ended in a bottle of brandy. In a bottle of
brandy ended the story of the shark who couldn't
stand a mess. The ascent was over but the great god
wouldn't readily shoulder great loads uselessly. Going back
home the trees were very delicate. I was very delicate going
back home! I lay on my back like a fly smeared with
honey. He was my exceedingly weak king I his queen covered
with blood. You are my exceedingly weak king covered in purple!

Let's close an eye to the mafia of painters. Let's close
our eyelids to the ladies' blouses. Let's close up
shop and disappear. We'll disappear in the mist with a pistol
shot at the ground.






The mind that brakes and determines itself is a nice game.
Cosmopolitan wisdom is the best perhaps of our
canastas. The mind that determines itself is perhaps
a fake game? Convinced of the contrary I pondered
the internal crisis of the country and observed flowing
into the great river of the city a tin of sardines.






For the windbag that I was I demand to be alive. In the windbag
that lives I demand to be inscribed. In the windbag that dies
boredom dies. You may be innocent yes: but the dawn is better
at target shooting.






Against every empire a need for order ruled. Against
every planet the need for freedom was imperative. With
childishness the night still ruled whispering
words perhaps bitter. With training of the stingy relative
the rebels' revolver got moving. With the light on
the catarrh got moving the old woolen thread rolled up in the
substance of the estate. I heard the watchmakers' voices wound up
but the world's fiber was the most constant measure of my
disease! It was the strongest substance of my belief.






If in divine love there's someone who pays the way it isn't for nothing
that I sing. If in love people leave one another and take one another
it isn't for nothing that I climb mountains. If in the mountain
there are those who look for those who sneer, it isn't for nothing I
fall at feet of the first passerby.






For the love I brought you you saw clearly. If in the afternoon
there was a bell, it was for you — In the afternoon I saw
clearly! If in the passage of the moon there was gangrene
it was for you. Against all evil seeing and knowing. Not to
die an escapade was necessary once in a while. The neighborhood
became pale pale and its waiting was all a sleep.
The unapproachable neighborhood was always awake. The doctor's
pill was necessary to remember. I lived among
saints yet remained saintly. The chorally within me awoke
yearning. The whole world was a huge yearning! Behold the
world awakening within me like a wide unconscious boat.
Behold the world telling me it's time to sleep. Behold the
world knocking at my door and I not answering. Behold the drudgery
that doesn't help anyone. Behold it's time to shine.






Love permitting I stretched out very pretty on the giant
king-sized bed waiting for some secret. Secrecy
and jealousy were born of long withheld modesty and the candy
exploded of inviolable feeling between two strangers.
The long withheld imagination succumbed under the
weight of the reveler disguised as a tearful servant in waiting.






For the coastline of your tears I wet a whole carpet.






Convinced of being faithful to you I betrayed within me joy
and sorrow: equidistant equinox that kept me away from
the sea, from the smell of the woods that are your calm
my tide of dreams.






Seek me and take flight.






The door of pain opened. Without eyes I foresaw
disaster.

Without honor it was impossible to mix up
the cards. . .






       The way of my walk was a delicate silver
flame, o girlishness that awakes when
all the ships have raised anchor! Way of my
girlishness against a scarlet sky. So the
dance of death unfolded: hours of prayer
and fasting, whole hours that now break
on the thorny walk and the wet beach, moving
ice.


___________________________


Amelia Rosselli
W A R     V A R I A T I O N S
Otis Books /Seismicity Editions
Otis College of Art and Design
2016

Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996), often said to be one of the best Italian writers of her generation, was heavily influenced by traumatic events in her youth. When Rosselli was only seven, her father and uncle, two leaders of the anti-Fascist Resistance, were brutally assassinated by the Fascist secret service. Then, when she was seventeen, her mother died and Rosselli suffered her first nervous breakdown. The deaths of her parents left her with lifelong paranoia, depression and what she called an emotional void. Born into exile, she grew up between France, England, and the United States before returning to Italy in 1946. She studied music, composition, as well as ethnomusicology and published several essays on music. Rosselli also worked as a literary translator and among the poets she translated were Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. During her lifetime Rosselli wrote eight poetry collections, with verses in English, French, and Italian, and tried to make sense of the post-war world. She was associated with several neo-avant-garde poetry movements in the 60s and 70s. At a time when the confessional mode was quite popular, Rosselli sought objectivism in her work, and was influenced by Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Rosselli took her life in 1996 on the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide.

N E W     D I R E C T I O N S     P U B L I S H E R S