Traces of Time
$9.99
July 14, 2015
poetry | pb | 159 pgs
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-940953-14-4
“Traces of Time is a book of insinuating wisdom and delight. The poems are lyric, lucid, and often brief, but they never feel slight because they ponder, on a tangibly human scale, the secrets of existence. . . . There are few books of poems in which I like every poem. This is one of them.”
—Dana Gioia
“Lucio Mariani’s Traces of Time indeed traces almost forty years of his work as a lyric poet of sparest, most incisive, means. Following the course of myth, history, and the city of Rome that sustains him, Mariani reveals the frailty of our understanding and the paradoxes of our desires, aware that the poet’s task is to find a form in which what is cherished can endure. The interlocutors of Mariani’s poems are those who need them: his loves and enemies, his friends and strangers, and, most of all, his descendants—his readers, now and in the future.”—Susan Stewart
Lucio Mariani is one of Italy’s most widely translated contemporary poets. His work restores to the lyric an ancestral, mythical sensibility that reminds us of our place in history today, at the start of a dizzying and displacing millennium. It is a poetry that reclaims for itself a centering and ethical function: a function embodied, in the past, by the likes of Eugenio Montale, or William Meredith. But Mariani goes further, in penning some of the finest poesia civile being written anywhere, in any language.” (Read an Excerpt)
Translated from the Italian by Anthony Molino
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About the Author: Lucio Mariani is the author of eight volumes of poetry including Qualche Notizia del Tempo (Some News of Time) and Echoes of Memory, as well as a volume of essays, a collection of short stories, and translations of works by César Vallejo, Tristan Corbière, and Yves Bonnefoy.
About the Translator: Anthony Molino is a translator from the Italian, an anthropologist, and a psychoanalyst. His translations include Lucio Mariani's Echoes of Memory and works by Valerio Magrelli and Antonio Porta, among others.
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“I can think of no contemporary poetry I would rather be reading at this moment. . . . Lucio Mariani writes with immense tenderness and grace, with remarkable density and swiftness.”
—Mark Rudman
"Translator Anthony Molino first introduced Mariani’s poetry to the English world more than a decade ago, and now he brilliantly provides this ampler selection, spanning four decades, which broadens our view of Mariani and confirms his importance. Molino has single-handedly made Mariani matter in English.”
—Geoffrey Brock
