BOOK REVIEW: 'A good anthology is a fine buffet.'

‘A good anthology is a fine buffet. A good anthology of poetry in translation is a buffet of dishes that are probably new to you. A good anthology of contemporary poetry in translation is a buffet of dishes that are new to everyone at the party. And Tempo: Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry, published in 2023 by Parthian and edited by Luca Paci, offers a delectable overview of a specific literary scene that can’t be easily sampled elsewhere, at least not in one place.

‘Paci, a translingual poet and translator who teaches Italian Studies at Cardiff University, has an in-depth knowledge of the poetry world in both languages, making him a perfect guide and mediator. His selection of poets currently working in Italian is highly representative—these are well-established figures, most of them mid-career—yet covers a range of very different styles and subject matter. We find poems that are experimental, lyrical, written for performance, in prose form, in rhymed quatrains; about politics, spirituality, sexuality, grief. They draw their words from antiquity and ad slogans, from the dissecting table and the factory floor. The country’s strong tradition of dialect poetry and its overall linguistic diversity is also represented, with poems in Sardinian, in Venetian, or incorporating Somali.’

Thanks Johanna Bishop for this intelligent review of Tempo: Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry