Archipelago is a bilingual selection of poems by the leading Italian
poet Antonella Anedda drawn from five collections she has published in
Italy. Her poetry has a searing, disruptive quality, an honesty that is
hard won. Her words have the air of breaking the silence reluctantly,
and they keep the silence with them. This stringent, ferrous element
sets her at odds with the eloquence and lyricism characteristic of the
Italian poetic tradition, and may owe something to an alternative
nationality, a different landscape. Though born in Rome, she comes from
a Sardinian family and has passed a great deal of her life between the
capital and a small island, La Maddalena, off the coast of Sardinia, and
the languages she was brought up hearing were Logudorese, Catalan from
Alghero, and Corsican French mixed with the dialect of La Maddalena -
and of late she has found herself also writing a number of poems in
Logudorese. While her poems have a geographical sweep, there is also an
insistence on domestic detail - balconies, crockery, sewing, cooking:
elements often considered too humble to warrant poetic attention. But
even here they are often set against a backdrop of war and insecurity,
and a poem in these surroundings, such as her 'Kitchen', is as likely to
be the site of a haunting. Her first book, Winter Residences, already
posited an elsewhere, that of St Petersburg, and an elective affinity
with another culture. With time, and with the emergence of her next four
books of poetry, this sense of apartness has increased, as has the force
and particularity of her language - and has made her, along with Valerio
Magrelli, one of the most valued and original poets of her generation.
