Amelia Rosselli is new to me. She was an Italian poet who, being fundamentally tri-lingual, seems to have had an approach to language that had more to do with the spaces between words – the zip-zaps of those inter-lingual synapses – than most can manage. It makes her an evocative and interesting poet. Her inter-lingual power, I suspect, one of the reasons her stanzas feel as if they are starting mid story. Reading through the text, it is like a repeated sky-dive into the fray. It’s wonderful.

For example, here is one that is the best evocation of female aging within this Euro-American cultural space that I have ever read.

                    And the dawning will be
that string of pearls you wear always untied on your pearly
thinning neck, o! the
muffled bones that
press in the excited dazed laughter. And you
will wear bandages on those tendons
snapped by the fury of loving
joyfully.

Here is another, one that comes right after in the edition I am reading.

                         of your oh nothing is the world and
   nothing
said is your word, kept on its diagonal
axis by the steps of illiterates. And beyond any saying is
   the true
schoolbook. Summer smiles in a sweet rustle of soft
green leaves, but the darkness of its weaving I won't tell.
And my necklace of ideals (only the earth knew the shore
it lapped while men squeezed the flower) is a dream
more real than your candied light pressed in today's
   machine.

The way she breaks apart linguistic expectation allows for the strands that string the pearls to take a place in the construction of meaning.

the strings that bind and order, visible

How cool is that.

The second bit seems to me to speak of that silence I am reading about in Sara Maitland’s book. That same silence I so want for myself. So tomorrow on my break at work I will be reading poetry at the Starbucks across the street. One way to survive.

War Variations by Amelia Rosselli, translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti