Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many
of which began as literary works--Arabian Nights, The Gospel
According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among
them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet,
publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a
visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of
these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years,
but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic
styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would
still elude the English-language reader.
For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many
facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim,
idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes
currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from
every period of Pasolini's poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives
English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose
verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences,
and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social
spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known
in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to
Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how
poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political
essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was "a poet of the cinema," as
James Ivory says in the book's foreword, who "left a trove of words on
paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on
celluloid cannot."
This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and
film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters.
