Alda Merini is one of Italy's most important, and most beloved, living
poets. She has won many of the major national literary prizes and has
twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize--by the French Academy in 1996
and by Italian PEN in 2001. In Love Lessons, the distinguished
American poet Susan Stewart brings us the largest and most comprehensive
selection of Merini's poetry to appear in English. Complete with the
original Italian on facing pages, a critical introduction, and
explanatory notes, this collection gathers lyrics, meditations, and
aphorisms that span fifty years, from Merini's first books of the 1950s
to an unpublished poem from 2001. These accessible and moving poems
reflect the experiences of a writer who, after beginning her career at
the center of Italian Modernist circles when she was a teenager, went
silent in her twenties, spending much of the next two decades in mental
hospitals, only to reemerge in the 1970s to a full renewal of her gifts,
an outpouring of new work, and great renown.
Whether she is working in the briefest, most incisive lyric mode or the
complex time schemes of longer meditations, Merini's deep knowledge of
classical and Christian myth gives her work a universal, philosophical
resonance, revealing what is at heart her tragic sense of life. At the
same time, her ironic wit, delight in nature, and affection for her
native Milan underlie even her most harrowing poems of suffering. In
Stewart's skillful translations readers will discover a true sibyl of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
