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Blind Spots

Part One of this collection, “Thinking About Montale by the River Hull,” attempts to splice material of various kinds (imagery, quotations, etc.) from Eugenio Montale’s Collected Poems (Tr. Jonathan Galassi) with images found in contemporary Hull, sometimes filtered through a further literary imagination, that of Philip Larkin. “Shades” for example imagines a personal encounter with Larkin in the University Library, tracing Montale’s interpretation of the “shade” to a favourite source, Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto 21) and the poet Statius’s first meeting with Virgil.

Some research into mediaeval cosmology informed both “Little Epic” and the sestina, “Walking on Hailstones”, and takes its epigraph from Dante’s “Rime Petrose.” Part Two (“Blind Spots”) includes prose-poems, further responses to Larkin and an autobiographical account of optical tests and treatment, considering the relationship of compromised “normal” vision and heightened poetic vision.

This collection is dominated by the literary “response-poem,” with poems by Montale, Dante and Larkin the main objects of my response. As quotations from these authors are interwoven in my texts, similarly I attempt to build certain poems from musical motifs and structures. For example, the “Humming Song” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly underlies the rhythms of “Words for her Vigil.”

The Italian-influenced poems dominating Part 1 of this collection are my original work and not translations by any definition of the term. Responding to poems by Eugenio Montale and, via Montale, Dante, my opening sequence fuses contemporary imagery, diction and literary style with elements from the chosen text, perhaps simply a phrase or metaphor. The poems are founded on attentive readings of the original texts, for which I used parallel Italian-English editions, and listened to Italian-language recordings. The approach to literature as response, or conversation, is one aspect of a multi-dimensional, vertical-and-horizontal poetics I have evolved.