Amelia Rosselli

Tio Okuvliga lågor är en antologi av italiensk poesi. Tio kvinnor som har präglat 1900-talets italiensk lyrik presenteras i denna bok, många av dem för första gången i svensk översättning.

A major, career-spanning collection of an Italian master's poetry in English, gathered together for the first time. Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy, and recognized as such throughout Europe. She was also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The child of Carlo Rosselli, a major figure in the resistance to Mussolini who was assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Rosselli grew up in exile and went to high school in Scarsdale, making her fluent in English. English poetry, especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, became a prime reference for her own poetry, which mingles formal experimentation with memories of traditional forms to evoke the struggles of an embattled conscience. Rosselli's English poems, some of which were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s, are a major part of her body of work and are invariably included in Italian editions of her collected works. Sleep, the title under which Rosselli herself gathered these poems, is the first publication of her haunting and utterly original English oeuvre by an English publisher.

A three-pack of our Spring 2015 Poetry Pamphlets, featuring: A Hermit's Guide to Home Economics, by Robert Lax Dirt Poem, by Ferreira Gullar Hospital Series, by Amelia Rossell

Hospital Series, a bruisingly intimate colloquy with an elusive lover, is Italian poet Amelia Rosselli’s virtuoso, subversive, neo-Petrarchan sequence of poems. Rosselli wrote much of the series in the mid 1960s after being hospitalized for a mental illness she suffered from for most of her life, and whose pain shapes her language and difficult vision. These explosive poems, a furious cacophonic crescendo of semantic and syntactic accumulations deeply admired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, place Rosselli among the greatest writers of her generation.

A musician, musicologist, and self-defined "poet of research," Amelia Rosselli (1930-96) was one of the most important poets to emerge from Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Following a childhood and adolescence spent in exile from Fascist Italy between France, England, and the United States, Rosselli was driven to express the hopes and devastations of the postwar epoch through her demanding and defamiliarizing lines. Rosselli's trilingual body of work synthesizes a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, in which playful inventions across Italian, English, and French coexist with unadorned social critique. In a period dominated by the confessional mode, Rosselli aspired to compose stanzas characterized by a new objectivity and collective orientation, "where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen." Having chosen Italy as an "ideal fatherland," Rosselli wrote searching and often discomposing verse that redefined the domain of Italian poetics and, in the process, changed the Italian language irrevocably. This collection, the first to bring together a generous selection of her poems and prose in English and in translation, is enhanced by an extensive critical introduction and notes by translator Jennifer Scappettone. Equipping readers with the context necessary for appreciating Rosselli's experimental approach to language, Locomotrix seeks to introduce English-language readers to this crucial, if still eclipsed, voice of the twentieth century.