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

the aid of worthy collaborators, evokes its

figures and characters, while he reaches out

to young and older poets alike.

His rentréee onto the scene of dialect

poetry takes place in 1986 with Cantu d’amuri

[Love Song], a poem (whose first inspiration

goes back to 1964), modeled after the line of

“a koinè of noble literariness”32: a hymn to

love and its capacity to dissolve the vapors of

habit; love leads the poet back onto the paths

of memory, through which he reconstructs

times and places, seasons and circumstances,

of a personal historia, illuminates the

present and transcends it. A poetic language

of surprising freshness and vividness, in

which the discursive cadence is enriched by

a suffused lyricism and by a skillful play of

metaphors. His subsequent works are, in

1988: Quaranta [Forty], a collection of poems

composed between 1957 and 1969, which