Though she has written and translated verse in Italian and English for decades, de Rachewiltz remains best known as the daughter of Ezra Pound, and for her well-received memoir of Pound and his circle, Discretions
(1971). Here she makes her own the compact, innovative forms created in part by her father and in part by his disciples, especially the English poet Basil Bunting. Though individual poems focus on Italian art and landscape, on Egyptian myths, and on romantic passion, most of the poems also touch on late life: "In old age/ it matters not/ if you were/ in company/ of love or alone." De Rachewiltz conceives her speaker's life as a continuous, difficult journey, one that survives (if only barely) translation into a retrospective and paradoxically playful lyric mode: "Each Mary must from hearthstone/ to heart stone into the ovens/ wander and search the ashes/ for the bone luz and the flint." Evocations of mountain and farm life bear the welcome marks of long reflection, though some suggest, too, the perils of working in relative isolation; a promising poem about inherited anger, "Of the House that Pays," ends jarringly "as we sail and sink into madness." But other poems combine verbal play with an elegiac tendency whose odd bluntness works perfectly: "I sit here under grey/ holding walls/ in an old skirt. Mourning./ Not knowing the taste of good food." At once refined, terse and strongly felt, de Rachewiltz's poetry is strange yet not unfamiliar. (Nov.)
