From Publishers Weekly
In this wide-ranging collection of essays, art criticism, memoirs and notebook excerpts, poet and essayist Di Piero (The Dog Star; Memory and Enthusiasm) continues to explore his lifelong passions?literary and visual art?from a personal perspective. He writes not as a detached scholar but as a working poet and art lover who, while highly knowledgeable about his subjects, is always aware of how they figure in his own experience. In "Poetry and Sauerkraut," he mixes memoir with social critique as he reviews, with some ambivalence, his youth in a working-class Italian American neighborhood in South Philadelphia, and how his growing awareness of the world of literature, art and the creative intellect both enabled his escape and effected his estrangement from that world ("I have never shed that instinct for and anxiety about the incipient babble in sentences"). In the title essay, he considers the uses of such elements as charm, laughter, uncertainty and accident in poetry. Other essays discuss poets as disparate as Pound, Carruth, McGrath and Muir and the Hopi oral tradition. The book's second section addresses the visual arts, from Florentine religious painting to (at greater length) recent and contemporary art and photography. Di Piero's taste and judgments are refreshingly idiosyncratic, his frame of reference broad. If his approach is impressionistic rather than strictly logical, it's because he is more concerned with communicating his insights and enthusiasms than with persuading by argument.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Mallarme said the poet's job is to purify the language of the tribe. Here poet and translator Di Piero (Restorers, Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1992) explains his personal attempt to do just that, mainly by aligning his rich, working-class memories with a larger world of art and politics. While these 15 essays treat subjects as various as contemporary poetry and Renaissance painting, the best of them deal with personal encounters, such as "Gots Is What You Got," which sets Ruskin's notion of the genteel against the chorus of immigrant dialects Di Piero remembers from his childhood. Elsewhere, he chastises academic obfuscators who pretend to "speak for the oppressed while using [the] language of the oppressor," noting that the best criticism is written by someone who hears singing and sets out simply "to absorb and carry on?while observing and analyzing?that songfulness." This is indeed what Di Piero himself does superbly. For literature collections.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
