Tempo

'A rich, varied and timely collection. So little Italian poetry is ever translated and, even then, usually only the very familiar big-guns. Throughout this enjoyable anthology I relished not just the wealth of the Italian, but also the insensible (to me) sounds of so much dialect. Reading Tempo, it felt not like a collection of Italian poetry but of Mediterranean tongues. Each time I turned the page, there was something unexpected: not just the obviously different geometry of the lay-outs and languages, but also the subject matter - political verse, love poems, spiritual paradoxes, threnodies. With exquisite translations, this volume felt constantly inventive but also strangely restful.' - Tobias Jones author of The Dark Heart of Italy (Faber & Faber, 2013)

This collection with parallel texts in Italian and English gives the English-reading audience a sense of the great variety of the present poetic scene in Italy with a selection of twenty-one of the most representative contemporary poets.Contemporary Italian poetry offers an extraordinary array of styles, voices, approaches, ways of looking at the world and ways of representing it. This anthology tries to capture the multiplicity of these voices with its selection of the most representative poets from different backgrounds: academics, working-class writers, editors, journalists, performers, travellers and professional translators. The reader will discover a diverse poetry dealing with the topical concerns of identity, sex, politics, migration and race.