ABSTRACT
How invigorating to have so much poetry by Patrizia Cavalli now available in English. Modern Italian poetry, long dominated by outstanding Hermetic poets, often gives an impression of lyric intellectuality. In his important essay on her, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben first distinguishes the two "opposing tensions" of poetry considered as a "force field": "the hymn, whose contents consist of celebration, and the elegy, whose contents consist of lamentation". Agamben argues that twentieth-century Italian poetry is mostly elegiac and emphasizes the preeminence of the "elegiac orthodoxy" associated with Montale. Underscoring Cavalli's "incomparable mastery" in regard to caesuras, internal rhymes, and enjambments, and praising her "stupefying" prosodic know-how, the philosopher adds that her poetic language is perhaps "the most fluid, continuous, and colloquial in twentieth-century Italian poetry". He concludes that hymn and elegy blend in her verse, the celebrative aspects "liquefying" into lamentation and the lamentation "immediately becoming hymn-like".
