| Title | : | Breath: Poems and Letters |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 081956544X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780819565440 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published October 1, 2002 |
At the start of a promising career, Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) committed suicide, leaving behind several hundred poems known only to her closest friends. The posthumous publication of this work led Eugenio Montale to praise Pozzi's "desire to reduce the weight of words to the minimum." Her Modernist verse is lyrical and experimental, pastoral and erotic, powerfully evoking the northern Italian landscape and her personal tragedies amid the repressive climate of Fascism. Breath contains a representative selection of Pozzi's poems in an Italian/English bilingual format along with a number of her letters. In an introductory essay, editor-translator Lawrence Venuti documents her tormented life, considers her sophisticated thinking about her writing, and sketches the rich literary traditions that she inherited, creating a detailed context in which her poems can be more fully appreciated. The translations affiliate Pozzi's poetry with the work of comparable English-language writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker, establishing in translation what Pozzi lacked in a tradition of Modernist women's poetries.
Breath: Poems and Letters Reviews
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"Suppose we met tonight
on a path
sunk
in fog
puddles would dry
round our warm patch
of earth:
my cheek
against your clothes
sweet
deliverance
from life.
But the girls---
their smooth brows chide
my age: a tree
my sole mate..."
-Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938)
This is the second poet of Italian extraction that I've attempted reading this year. The first was Italian-Uruguayan Delmira Agustini, who, like Pozzi, was a fair-skinned woman born to overbearing upper-class parents who met a violent death in her late twenties after a thwarted romantic love experience. Agustini died after being shot in the head by a jealous ex-husband; Pozzi committed suicide by drug overdose and exposure, some years after her parents forbade her to marry the man she passionately loved, a classics professor named Antonio Maria Cervi. Pozzi's biography also superficially resembles that of another athletic, fair-skinned 20th-century female poet whose life ended prematurely in suicide and whose papers were heavily bowdlerized by her family after death: the American Sylvia Plath. The fraught father-daughter relationship and death-by-suicide also bring to mind the South African poet Ingrid Jonker.
The poems in this collection tend to blend into one another, as they are all rather similar, even though their dates of composition are spread out across a nine-year timespan. These poems are written in free verse and employ scenery-pieces from Pozzi's northern Italian landscape (snow-covered mountains, blue alpine lakes, stone houses, trees, birds, horses, etc.), in varying spatial and temporal arrangements, to evoke some highly charged emotional or psychological state, such as thwarted eros, nostalgia for childhood, or yearning for death. The language is stripped-down, haiku-like in its economy. The abrupt juxtaposition of disparate images is also haiku-like: e.g., "I show off/my scarlet/jumper/in the grey light:/but inside/soul feels/livid/like the soft flesh/of a drowned baby." Such sudden shifts in mood remind me of the concept of kireji that is so central to traditional Japanese haiku-writing.
Pozzi's imagery is always fresh, vivid, sometimes violent: "The lost puppy/still howls/in the brambles:/maybe the black-hoofed bay/broke into a run/& kicked him/in the face." However, there is a sort of flat literalism to these poems that I find rather limiting: for the most part, all the poems here use images that seem to be taken from direct visual observation, describing things that the poet actually saw. All these poems have the same speaker, which seems to be Pozzi herself. They read a bit like diary entries. In most of these poems, there are no "what if"s, no counterfactual suppositions, no complex imaginary constructs. Nowhere in these poems does Pozzi analyze why she feels the way she feels, verbalize an opinion or an ethical stance, assert a generalization, synthesize disparate components into a theory, enunciate a philosophy. There is no cerebration here, no analytical commentary on life's flux of events, just a dance of perception and emotion: quite lovely, but ultimately (for this one reader) rather unfulfilling.
