Anthracite - Bartolo Cattafi

Translated by Brian Cole, with an introduction by Peter Dale.
Parallel text, Italian / English

"Brian Cole translates Cattafi's precise meditations and unexpected imagery with skill and subtlety."

Translation Review:

"This is a subtle book full of those flashes of half-recognition that come 'when the hawk has made his journey / from the fist to a heart.'" Susan Wicks

Visible Poets series, no. 1. Series editor: Jean Boase-Beier.

A selection from over 300 poems in the Collected Works, containing some of poet's finest writing. This collection reflects Cattafi's restlessness and his urge to travel - there are poems about islands, streets, cities, the sea, about places both familiar and unfamiliar to the English reader.

But we are also aware of a strong element of spiritual journeying in his poetry, as he probes the truth and meaning behind the existence of the concrete, the ordinary, the everyday. In this new translation, Brian Cole translates Cattafi's precise meditations and unexpected imagery with consummate skill that allows the English reader to share the poet's urgency of being "driven by necessity / to a truth clothed in falsehood".

Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, Summer 2000