Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

isolitudine ─ different from that of

sicilitudine ─ which emerges in Sicilian

poetry in Italian in the Eighties). A feeling of

protest against the powerful rises in the poet

when the nightmare of a war ─ of any war ─

reappears, as in “La cartullina” [The

Postcard]: a 1945 poem later included in ‘U

vascidduzzu^3.

A section of Voluntas tua is dedicated to

the “Life of the Mines,” to the bitter life of

the “pirriaturi” [pick man], as in Di

Giovanni.

Vann’Antò’s work shows echoes of the

youthful Futurist experience (more evident

in Il Fante), simmered in the great crucible of

that popular wisdom in which are mixed the

poet’s two souls: nature and culture, “high”

and “low” literature, reality and myth,

science and naïveté. Into that crucible flow