cover image Traces of Time

Traces of Time

Lucio Mariani, trans. from the Italian by Anthony Molino. Open Letter (openletterbooks.org), $14.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-940953-14-4

Mariani, a major Italian poet and translator, receives his second translation into English, following a selected volume from 2003, Echoes of Memory. This bilingual collection is a classical, bitter, passionate, and at times bombastic book that shows why Mariani’s reputation in Italy as a post-Montalian poet of history and myth is well deserved. The poems here span his entire four-decade career, and a concluding essay in which Mariani lays out his thoughts on poetry in the public sphere (a common subject of his poems), translation, and the poetic act itself: “There’s no star asking me to write my life,/ to clasp with my fingers at the dream and memory./ But/ this pen is what balances my wound.” Newer poems confront the ugliness of war, conflict, and protest, but always reveal Mariani’s enduring humanism and historical eye: “every man erects ruins for his heirs/ enacting inane protocols of war/ while the future slams its shutters tight.” Those familiar with Echoes (also translated by Molino) will find poems with similar qualities here; Mariani is a poet of a direct but careful music, formal integrity, a commitment to history, and a sharp wit capable of grand beauty and excoriating irony. [em](July) [/em]