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Tempo, Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry •  So That the Butterfly Won’t Die, Selected Poems by Hatif Janabi

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Tempo, Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry reviewed by Caroline Maldonado

Tempo, Excursions in 21st-Century Italian Poetry edited by Luca Paci.
£15. Parthian.ISBN 978-1-91-340-56-9

The title of this collection indicates that it makes no claims to be a revised canon of contemporary Italian poetry.  ‘Excursions’ suggests a more leisurely amble, a more personal and democratic approach. The Italian editor, Luca Paci, who has lived and worked in the UK for over 20 years sets out his principles and intentions in the introduction:

Poetry is an essential tool to understand and question at a deeper level events, feelings and attitudes of present and past, recognising the complexity of reality in a radically different way.

He highlights the diversity of Italian poetry in linguistic practice, form and origin. These are poems that criticise…

It is fifty years since I lived in the North of Ireland and I still don’t know what to call it. I am sensitive to my status as no more than an interested outsider when I come to write about poetry and literary issues in the Six Counties.My attention was caught by the apparent cancellation of the novelist, Rosemary Jenkinson, following publication inFortnightmagazine of an article where she argued that young writers should stop writing about the Troubles and that to do so was a form of regressive cashing in. The article met with a degree of outrage in some quarters and was followed by the cancellation of the writer’s publication contract with Doire Press which the publishers denied was a consequence of the article.^[1]Nevertheless, this was a deplorable occurrence and while I disagree with Jenkinson’s views, I see no reason why she should not express…

In this post[1], I shall be considering poems from Tenebrae and Canaan. I have omitted Mercian Hymns because I have discussed it in a previous post and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy because it is too long and because it is in some respects relatively straightforward.

When I first read ‘The Pentecost Castle’ which is the opening sequence in Tenebrae I had three thoughts: one was that the poem was beautiful; the second was that it sounded like devotional love poetry, akin to St John of the Cross or, further back, the Song of Solomon; the third was that the language was extraordinarily old.

It is comparatively easy to work out how the poem works its effect of loveliness. Hill uses beautiful images, many drawn from nature or from the traditional nature images of poetry: flower, briar rose, trees, aspen, river, wind, high…

Note: This post is a slightly revised version of an essay written for the course,Place in Modern Poetry and Prose: Locality, Environment, Community andExile,run by Oxford Department for Continuing Education and taught by Giles Goodland.A useful video of Sheri Benning talking about her book can be found at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBtJpcKoTLEandhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5yZPj8U4K4

The promise of the New World to those arriving from the old was the possibility of space, of horizons thrillingly distant, in the prairie lands of the USA and Canada. Sheri Benning is a Canadian poet who writes about Saskatchewan while Carrie Etter, from the USA, sets her poems in Illinois.

Etter traces the etymology of ‘prairie’ in the first poem in the second section ofThe Weather in Normallinking it to Arcadia and eclogue, before declaring that ‘Illinoisians were never raisedfor hills’

prairiethe horizon the veryedge of the world^[1]

For her, the prairie…

Back into the routine this week – 7am at my desk, entering into that place between dreams and waking where the writing seems to live. I watch the burnt orange sunrise and the jackdaws returning like a song, a score, streaming in single file to the beech trees outside my window. Then my second cup of coffee in the big mug with the speckled glaze, a chapter of my book (Samuel Pepy’s 1663 diaries right now) and a walk out with the dog, whatever the weather. This is what it is to be alive in the winter, not powering into resolutions, but, for me, it is about searching for that mid-winter peace. So often I have gotten lost in the cold and the dark of January. So often I have found myself winter-sick and waiting daily for spring. This year I decide to bed into…