\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my poetry,\u201d she said, \u201cthere has always been an emphasis on concrete detail, put more simply, I think I fell in love with reality\u2026.When we are interested in the world, we become disinterested in ourselves.\u201d Antonella Anedda, born in Rome to a family with centuries of roots in Sardinia, shows us the consequences and artistic possibilities of her disarming and passionate relationship with reality in the bi-lingual volume of her selected works, Emerging from the Winter Sea<\/i>, FSG, August, 2026.<\/p>\n
Article continues after advertisement<\/span><\/p>\n The publication of this rich compilation tracing eight of her books, from Winter Residences<\/i> (1992) to Geographies (prose)<\/i> (2021) comes at a time when poetry needs oxygen if readers are to breathe more freely once they have encountered it. Rejecting the imaginary lyrical voice, her work offers the beauty of commonplace detail from which stories make truth evident as complexity. From politics, the environment, to concepts of self, Anedda pulls herself back to let us experience simultaneous viewpoints that release language from its polarizing narratives.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I wrote, it\u2019s with concern Anedda\u2019s capacity to turn perspectives around by narrating unwritten angles in the same story is her most characteristic gift. She often constructs a dialogue among the poem\u2019s elements and the reader. Her juxtapositions nudge what is commonplace into something larger, polyphonic and new. Her poem \u201cSeptember 11, 2001\u2033 is an example of how she opens reality. Alluding to the attack only in the title, Anedda notes a few events showing the effects, patterns and tasks of an illustrator, the men seeking martyrdom, as well as the earthworms, gnats and the snail working the soil. She herself kneels, leaving us somewhere quiet as we contemplate the other story.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u201cSeptember\u2014says the calendar half consumed with drawings Praise these earthly creatures, the brief flight, the patient hand Below in the vegetable garden the radiant architecture of earthworms, Anedda\u2019s way of capturing different moments from different linguistic or interpretive points of view allows the everyday elements of our lives to find space in poetry, democratically.<\/p>\n \u201cThe things I name in poetry are not noble: In the same poem:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not music that you mean, but a thunderous clap of dishes, hail Anedda resists explaining the dominance of largely male voices of past narrations. She sees oppression in many categories from poverty to war and as such creates space for other ways of telling. Anedda\u2019s capacity to create a deeper frame of reference builds as she lets the world speak. She invites readers to hear other voices\u2014nature, soldiers, daughters, slaves, the dead, weather reports, all constants, all changing.<\/p>\n \u201cAutumn shines in a corner and the word forms Her language draws on ancient ones, dialects, extinct and modern ones.<\/p>\n \u201cThe word splits like wood Anedda accepts her composite language for contemporary poetry, (although not without irony).<\/p>\n \u201cI was thinking of larger words, For English readers, whose cultures and histories have largely been defined by the individual, Anedda\u2019s more collective interpretation of an identity repudiates social definitions. \u201cWhat\u2019s in a name? Nothing. A sound that summons a body, a bell that yokes you to it. To receive a name is the first proof that we are under the power of others.\u201d She embraces fluidity and change. Writing poetry about violence is not the same as experiencing it.<\/p>\n \u201cTurning our heads here, we think: while down there Thus, the way the environment, family, war, memory, art are written about arises from a natural concern about narrative. She suggests that much of the way we read is influenced by our beliefs. She challenges how much we can really know.<\/p>\n \u201cWe read history, we imagine the meaning of a siege. The traces of war appear in each of her books, as life and in death.<\/p>\n \u201cNews of the latest massacre arrives this evening \u201c8:a.m. For us not facing the bombs of actual war, the poet asks alarmingly direct questions about its persistent effects in all epochs.<\/p>\n \u2014\u201cYou really think not to be punished is enough not to be guilty, \u2014\u201cWhat makes the cemetery of a bombed city a cemetery. She neutralizes narrations of glory.<\/p>\n \u2026\u201dthe dust thrown to confuse As her translator, Anedda\u2019s thought, as well as some of her courage, became part of my existence in the long months such a project entails. Rendering something complex and alive, trying not to invent but remaining faithful to her language in another language, took over my thinking. Like a researcher in a lab, I was touching energies that were potentially life changing. I couldn\u2019t allow them to escape. Translations can be done in many ways. Beside particular word choices and possible errors, the decision of how one interprets the work\u2014whether to bring it into more contemporary form, to alter images to find equivalencies for English readers with different sensibilities\u2014is a constant. Trying to come closer to her lexicon and her vision, instead of rendering a smoother poem in English, was my main challenge.<\/p>\n I have lived as a writer in Italy for nearly fifty years and I tilted when necessary, in that direction. For us who come from literary traditions with shorter histories, Anedda\u2019s knowledge of language, her awareness of how it can die, how we forget its power to define and defend truths was the energy pushing my translations. Hers is a poetry that speaks from centuries of poetry, for its need for renewal, for its exits and entries into community, for its capacity to witness and invent, for the beauty of connection.<\/p>\n ______________________________<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
because I was worried about life
the happy people
caught in evening\u2019s shadows
that by evening suddenly fell on them from behind.\u201d<\/p>\n
of insects on its pages. Almost October is anticipated by the shells of snails
one for every day to cancel fear with their slowness.<\/p>\n
that draws: against the flames, against the celestial sky of paradise.<\/p>\n
a veil of ants under the apple tree. I kneel to the mud, the gnats
the snail, to the effort with which it climbs my fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n
they stay under the palate, waiting, conscious only of the warmth.\u201d<\/p>\n
that beats against the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
in its own rhythm: in clots, in vacuums,
in flashes, within centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n
as wood crackling on one side
half burning
half abandonment.\u201d<\/p>\n
strong enough to shake every sound from the shrub
I heard it alive in the throat: a fervor
that would have recognized in things
a flash of wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n
it happens for real to the ones being chased.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pots burn in the dark
full of wind and sand.
How else would you know to describe the vortex of hunger
that spins in the void with other ghosts?\u201d<\/p>\n
when you have put the last items in the washer
and pulled back the covers to ready the beds for sleep.
On the TV screen, the only light in the dark room,
dead faces and living dead, flashes of explosions,
naked bodies, and, in the rubble, a dog.\u201d<\/p>\n
we take the elevator down
unaware of storms on the coast
of corpses already tight in oilcloth and jute.\u201d<\/p>\n
but you are guilty.
The air is full of screams. They stick to the walls.\u201c<\/p>\n
Which contrast between the living and the dead, what memory of wind
and light\u2014sea light\u2014from the Pisan frescoes.\u201d<\/p>\n
the verdict: we are not saved
we don\u2019t save
except with an oblique courage
a gesture of minimum light.\u201d<\/p>\n