Emerging from the Winter Sea

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

Bowl of ashes. In the emptiness
that separates the rope of ferries without sails
the gulf that splits the flag and calls up
salt auctions of the past
without-the-river you count rings
in chains holding to the wharf.

Emerging from the Winter Sea is a wide-ranging collection of verse that brings together poems from across Antonella Anedda's career, showcasing the full depth and breadth of one of the most celebrated Italian poets working today.

The concerns of Anedda’s work—family, art, history, war—are approached with a deep sense of historicism. 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 simple language only seems so. In poems of domestic interiors, lines that succinctly capture great works of visual art, and verse describing 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 a close acquaintance with a voice of powerful authority.