“You see, one can live without having survived,” writes Carolyn Forché. That sounds grim, and indeed it is, but it also points to one of the qualities that makes contemporary poetry so remarkable: an inexhaustible resolve to see what is actually there. From Antonella Anedda’s panoramic and microcosmic view of European history to Theo LeGro’s posthumous chronicle of terminal illness, these poets are determined to transcend time and bear witness to the urgent horrors of our era as well as to the extraordinary beauty that war, hatred, and fear keep failing to stamp out. These poets urge us to dare to see the world with the same vivid courage.Article continues after advertisement
Antonella Anedda, trans. by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Emerging from the Winter Sea
(FSG)
This bilingual edition, the first career-spanning US selection from this major Italian poet, introduces Anedda’s quiet yet severe poetry to a wider audience. Her far-reaching vision—which spans European history and the webs of its empires—extends from the intimacy of the body, of the home and its “mild objects linked/ to an abandonment outside us/ but still within us.” Home may be peaceful, but at the same time “flames envelop latrines, metal roofs,/ the Oleanders burn sand up to the sky/ and further to the east, other blazes, terror, people in swarms./ Are they escaping? She doesn’t know.” This slippery logic and sense of simultaneity pervades the seemingly gentle textures of these poems. Something menacing is always lurking in the undercurrents beneath the words. And yet, even as she works to give voice to the unspeakable, to notice what’s beneath noticing, Anedda asserts that “each of us tells the story differently.”
