Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini - Paperback

by Alda Merini (Author), Susan Stewart (Translator)

Alda Merini is one of Italy's most important, and most beloved, living poets. She has won many of the major national literary prizes and has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize--by the French Academy in 1996 and by Italian PEN in 2001. In Love Lessons, the distinguished American poet Susan Stewart brings us the largest and most comprehensive selection of Merini's poetry to appear in English. Complete with the original Italian on facing pages, a critical introduction, and explanatory notes, this collection gathers lyrics, meditations, and aphorisms that span fifty years, from Merini's first books of the 1950s to an unpublished poem from 2001. These accessible and moving poems reflect the experiences of a writer who, after beginning her career at the center of Italian Modernist circles when she was a teenager, went silent in her twenties, spending much of the next two decades in mental hospitals, only to reemerge in the 1970s to a full renewal of her gifts, an outpouring of new work, and great renown.

Back Jacket

"What we have in Love Lessons is a fantastic selection of poems by Alda Merini, one of Italy's foremost poets, translated into English by Susan Stewart, one of America's foremost poets. As millions of Italian readers already know--and English readers are about to discover for the first time--to open a book by Merini is to discover a poetry of immediate freshness, unlike any other."--Robert P. Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, Stanford University

"Alda Merini is one of the most powerful contemporary female poets writing in Italian. In poems marked by a visionary clarity and lyricism, she sings of the anger and pain of both erotic love and insanity. Susan Stewart's translation is breathtaking. She has accomplished the impossible: a faithful, almost line-by-line translation that is deeply and authentically poetic. The poems speak in their own tongue."--Margaret Brose, University of California, Santa Cruz

Author Biography

Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including Red Rover and Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. A former MacArthur Fellow, she is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.