Sleep-Fast Shipping

Description

A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master’s poetry in English, gathered together for the first time.

Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy. She wasalso a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and KarlheinzStockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. Thechild of Carlo Rosselli, a significant anti-fascist intellectual who wasassassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Amelia grew up in exileand attended high school in Mamaroneck, New York. English poetry,especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans,became a prime reference for her own poetry, which combines modernistexperimentation with variations on more traditional forms.

Theelaborate, archaic, yet thoroughly modern poems, at once stumbling andsinging, that Rosselli composed in English and gathered under the title Sleep are a beautiful and illuminating part of her work. Six of the poemswere published by John Ashbery in the 1960s but have otherwise beenunavailable to English readers. They are published here for the firsttime outside of Italy.