Poems

Poetry. Translated from the Italian, edited, and introduced by Sean Mark. Bilingual Edition. Selected poems from 1969-2014. In his introduction to the experimental Italian poet Antonio Sagredo, translator Sean Mark writes: "Though his poetic diction may evoke voices of the past, or revisit odes, sonnets and satirae, Sagredo is by no means a classicist, a reviver of dry and yellowing verse, harking after the restoration of obsolete orders; rather, his verbosity is a mark of distinction, of the fullness of his ’visions, alcohols, words.’ Any temporal continuity is constantly short-circuited, as we skip from Keats’s Hampstead, to Stalinist Russia via 17th-century Counter- Reformation Naples; and alongside the ceremony and magniloquence sits a colloquial, tender undercurrent... a playful and knowing pastiche... In the realm of contemporary poetry, Sagredo’s work ventures in distinctly unfrequented directions—he is, like his poetic personae, a heretic to all schools, whose work resembles that of no other contemporary Italian poet."