Published to mark the first centenary of Italy's entry into the Great War, Like Leaves in Autumn features 21 original Italian poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, with new English translations by Heather Scott. These are set alongside 21 new poems by contemporary Scottish poets writing in response to Ungaretti, and are illustrated with striking black-and-white artworks from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, owned by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. One of Europe's greatest modernist poets, Ungaretti was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Italian family from Tuscany. From 1915, he served in the Italian infantry in the campaign against Austria-Hungary. It was a ferocious conflict fought in the mountains of Northern Italy in trenches dug out of Alpine rock. Thousands died and Ungaretti's poems, written during pauses in the fighting, channel these horrific experiences. In addition to his grief and loss, these verses are shaped both by Ungaretti's sense of exile and by his intense life-affirming poetic sensibility. A century on, this anthology offers a creative interplay of recollection, translation and new inspiration. Italian, English, Scots and Gaelic voices mingle on these pages, and the artworks spark a dialogue between words and images, creating an alchemy of further meanings.

Geoffrey Brock, whose translations have won him Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, finally does justice to these slim, concentrated verses in his English translation, alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti's Italian originals. Famed for his brevity, Ungaretti's early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction.

A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age.
Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.