Synopses & Reviews
The sardonic force of his shrewd observations of the contemporary scene remains unblunted even as the poet has become more involved with everyday, more private, more self-revealing. Here it gains even greater prominence as the poet attempts to find catchholds and constancies in an unstable world, finally to accede to 'precariousness the muse of our time.'
Review
"Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale is a poet of mutability. Beginning with the appearance of his first book more than 50 years ago, all his work has been an attempt to describe the intricate and delicate process by which consciousness confronts the changeable surfaces of the world. Skeptical, ironic, subtle, he shuns visions of the apocalypse for a precise and minutely observed rendering of the real, composing from the fleeting images of everyday life an enduring portrait of the modern landscape. And, now in his 80s, Montale has produced a book of old age and memory, a virtual last will and testament. "There are some who live in the time/ allotted to them, not knowing/ that time is reversible like/ the ribbon of a typewriter. He/ who digs into the past would know/ that barely a millionth of a second/ divides the past from the future." But if these poems look back in time, they are still firmly rooted in the present. Montale does not vanish into the scenes of his youth; rather, he demonstrates how in the last years of life the past continually bubbles up into the present and becomes a tangible presence in its own right. This is not a book of regret and loss, and Montale's evocations are poignant precisely because they are tough-minded. Even the future leaves him unperturbed, and he responds to the thought of his own death with a whimsical and urbane sense of acceptance: "If the thought of death was sad,/ the thought that All will last/ is even more frightening." Rarely have the textures of old age been so gracefully and movingly brought forth in poetry. A superb book, by one of the major poets of our time." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
The sardonic force of his shrewd observations of the contemporary scene remains unblunted even as the poet has become more involved with everyday, more private, more self-revealing. Here it gains even greater prominence as the poet attempts to find catchholds and constancies in an unstable world, finally to accede to 'precariousness the muse of our time.'
Synopsis
This book appeared in Italy during the Nobel laureate's eighty-second year.
About the Author
Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.