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)
This book appeared in Italy during the Nobel laureate's
eighty-second year. 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.'
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