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

deserted bends full of stones, crumbling

embankments and slender alders, express in

the pure symbol all the fragility of the

human condition, whose existence is always

tied to a praxis that mediates between

Nature and History.

Feminine cunning and deception,

sexuality that is practiced but not spoken

interest him for the particular kind of social

cohesion they favor. After decades of shame

for the use of dialect (shame taught by

elemenatry school teachers with their red

pencils), these texts, always experimental

and a bit deranged and ironic, never

redundant or nostalgic, wink at a rural

world that survives only in those words,

sayings, witticisms, fragments taken from

the idioms of the peoples that have stratified

our lives through the centuries, even in a

cultural sense. We are like the rings of a tree.