Reviews

In her essay "How I write poetry" published at the beginning of 2021 in Poetry Wales, Rosalind Hudis concludes with a reference to Alice Oswald's notion of poetry as "carving from sound."

Just over a hundred years ago, Giuseppe Ungaretti upended Italian poetry. With L’Allegria, written, scribbled on scraps, for the most part while he was in the trenches on Italy’s disastrous Isonzo Front—some half million dead and the concluding catastrophe of Caparetto—Ungaretti stripped poetry of all ornament, reducing the physical poetic unit—if there is indeed such a thing—to the single word, the syllable. Geoffrey Brock’s new translation of L’Allegria (1931), published in a bilingual edition by Archipelago Books and very aptly titled Allegria, is as faithful and rewarding as any English rendition of Ungaretti’s work could be.