Emerging from the Winter Sea

A bilingual edition of the selected poems of the celebrated contemporary Italian poet Antonella Anedda.

A thin stream of water flows into the sink
ice stripes the windows
and it’s difficult to think about the sea breeze
and the banging of the trolleys
and the whistle of the morning siren
none imply heroism.
from “In the windows”

Emerging from the Winter Sea is a wide-ranging bilingual collection that brings together poems from across Antonella Anedda’s career, showcasing the depth and range of one of Italy’s most celebrated poets.
The concerns of Anedda’s work—family, art, nature, war—are approached with a deep sense of the context of history, surging and receding like the waves that strike La Maddalena, the Sardinian archipelago she sees as a homeland. Her Italian is fresh, evolving, tied to, though straying from, local dialects and the lineage of Latin; it is clear in its communicative power yet elemental in that her simple language only seems so. In poems of domestic interiors, lines that succinctly capture great works of visual art, and descriptions of the great destruction wrought by nations at war, Anedda emerges as a sharp poetic chronicler of history as it is lived. The effect is one of startling intimacy, and of close acquaintance with a voice of powerful authority.