Poetic Notebook 1974-1977 Paperback by Eugenio Montale;William Arrowsmith

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2012-12-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 192 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780393344189
• Item Weight: 321.21 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

Poetic Notebook 1974–1977, one of the final volumes assembled by Eugenio Montale before his death, shows the last act of the twentieth-century master to be one of splendid negation.

Poetic Notebook 1974–1977 evokes a magnificent savagery, an attack on the poet himself and on the nihilistic squalor that he observes around him. An old man, Montale remembers his youth and recalls the dead. At times he seems to wonder if he himself is dead. And so his is a grim majesty, a new kind of poetry that faces the void: “She’s lied too often, now let darkness, / void, nothingness fall on her page. / Rely on this, my scribbling friend: / Trust the darkness when the light lies.”

About the Author

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

William Arrowsmith was a renowned translator and classics scholar.

Rosanna Warren is the author of Hindsight and six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.