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

world of childhood, that can be evoked

through poetry but is unrepeatable. The

aversion to naive folklorism and idyllic

landscapes is unconditional in a poet who

pours into the Tursi dialect his need to

escape the simple language of

communication. Even when he is epic,

Pierro places himself at the center of the

song, he filters the subject through personal

memory, with moods which are

embarrassing for the ambiguity between

sleep and wakefulness, with the recognition

of someone who knows that reality is no

longer modifiable and goes on living with a

cult of the lost past, expressed in a chtonic,

mournful voice, inconsolable in the love

poems. In this fashion his poetry follows the

wake of the “crepuscolari” and of Pascoli,

Biagio Marin and P. P. Pasolini, adding his

own unmistakable new signs, of very high