Selected Poems

by Bertolucci, Attilio; Tomlinson, Charles

• ISBN13: 9781852242428
• ISBN10: 1852242426
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-08-01
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Summary

Attilio Bertolucci is Italy's greatest living poet. This book is the first English edition of his poetry. His translator Charles Tomlinson is known internationally as one of the most distinguished modern English poets: his poems were described by Hugh Kenner as 'among the best in the English language in this century'.
Born in 1911, Attilio Bertolucci published his first book of poems at the age of 18. His second, published in 1934, was recognised and favourably reviewed by Eugenio Montale. There followed a period of silence, broken in 1951 by The Indian Wigwam, which won the Viareggio Prize. He published two other books in the early 50s, but no more poetry until Winter Journey in 1971, his most mature book to date and his most boldly experimental. He has also published two bestselling volumes of a novel in verse, La camera da letto, a kind of family history about his parents and childhood, and his love for Ninetta, the mother of Giuseppe and Bernardo Bertolucci, his two film-director sons.
A frequent cause of pleasure and also disquiet in Bertolucci's poetry is his sense of time, the calm fire of the days. The critic Paolo Lagazzi speaks of Bertolucci, although slowly bleeding to death because wounded by time, as also drawing from time 'all the gifts, colours, sweetnesses still possible - while darkness and winter advance without truce'.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. 10
Introduction	p. 11
Wind	p. 19
Autumn Morning	p. 21
Torrent	p. 23
Solitude	p. 25
Fires in November	p. 29
October Night	p. 31
Page from a Diary	p. 33
Love Close...	p. 35
October	p. 37
Insomnia	p. 39
To My Brother	p. 43
For B...	p. 45
At Home	p. 47
The Years	p. 49
April for B...	p. 51
Letter from Home	p. 53
To Giuseppe, in October	p. 55
The Indian Wigwam I	p. 59
from The Indian Wigwam II	p. 65
Home Thoughts	p. 69
To His Mother Whose Name Was Maria	p. 71
Fragment (left out of The Indian Wigwam)	p. 73
The Friar	p. 75
The Ants	p. 77
Children, Sent Out after School for Violets	p. 79
Poppies	p. 83
Butterflies	p. 85
Decorators Are Artists	p. 87
The Cableway	p. 89
Towards Casarola	p. 93
Waiting for Rain	p. 97
Near Shrine B, on an August Day	p. 99
The Time Is Consuming Itself	p. 107
Public Garden	p. 109
The Wind and the Rain	p. 111
Portrait of a Sick Man	p. 113
The Hotel	p. 115
Eliot at Twelve Years	p. 117
The Months	p. 119
The Hotel Once More	p. 121
Fragment Left Out of the Novel in Verse	p. 123
Solo	p. 125
The Bedroom: I A History Imagined: the migration of the Maremmans	p. 129
The Bedroom: X How Anxiety Is Born	p. 133
XXIII O Psalmist: Don Attilio	p. 139
XXXI The Doeskin Shoes	p. 141
Giovanni Diodati	p. 151
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