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

mother, the mirror, the dream, the beloved

dead, the ancestral home, the streets, the loss

of love, the town characters, the birds, the

toponyms and ravines, the superstitions, the

sorrows expressed in a “very harsh tongue”

and in “Orphic sweetness” (as A. Pizzuto

noted), in variously rhymed

hendecasyllables or in shorter, faster

cadences, that show an experimental

approach to the poetic language adopted.

In 1982 Franco Manescalchi noted that

“If Pierro’s dialect poetry has had an effect

on the poets of the younger generations, this

has happened more in the sense of the

liberation of language rather than in a

dialect production, which is in fact not very

substantial and relevant. On the other hand,

even for Pierro dialect poetry is a late

discovery, in syntony and synchrony with

the reassessment of dialect culture carried