Poetry 'Ruthless" and "pitiless" are not words that show up too often on the dust-jacket of poetry books, least of all used in approval. But that's just one of the reasons Michele Ranchetti's first poetry publication in Ireland is worth noting.
And with a mere handful of contemporary Italian poets known over here, this beautifully produced volume, which includes translations in both English and Irish, represents a major endorsement on the part of the publisher.
Born in Milan in 1925, Michele Ranchetti has emerged over the last 15 years as what the introduction calls a "multi-faceted presence in the Italian literary world". In fact this is not least for his Scritti diversi, a three-volume work combining philosophy, religious and social history. Ranchetti is also a translator of Freud and Wittgenstein, and lectures in ecclesiastical history at the University of Florence. All of these interests and influences are, to a greater or lesser extent, reflected in the poems.
The poems, or rather the fragments of the long poem that is this book, are at once grimly focused and full of doubt, solitary and interconnected. As a sequence they move forward, however hesitantly, towards that final word "vita/life/beatha" the way a shipwreck might swim towards a distant island. There are some dark and troubled waters here.
An Irish reader, undoubtedly more familiar with poems that draw strongly on narrative and image, may find Ranchetti's work disturbingly spare, and heavily conscious of its modes of saying. Verbale certainly does not have what one might call verbal ease. And yet, like the best poetry, Ranchetti's gains authority and depth with every reading.
Meeting him on his own territory, the English and Irish versions add to the sense of a universal being glimpsed or struggled with in a particular.
Though Ranchetti himself warns against interpretation, at least one aspect of this particular is the death of his mother, returned to again and again.
Death is nothing, isn't frightening
frightening is the one who's dying.
In fact, from the outset, Verbale acknowledges the end of something gone before ("There remains/ only an offering . . .") and marks a continuation on borrowed time.
But Ranchetti is after something bigger than just the personal here.
"Time," he says, "is immeasurable present" and his goal is the examination of the nature of time and change in the light, or shadow, of loss.
The title of this book (Minutes as in the minutes of a meeting) puts Ranchetti in an encounter with both history and fate. And it is with a cold but clear eye that he views both.
His brief explanatory afterword might be both unnecessary and, frankly, almost impenetrable, but those fragments start to linger and to spark back and forth among themselves, taking on a life of their own. And sometimes they even offer up those little gems that should persuade even more reluctant, puzzled readers to stay the course.
Light winging through country dusk
short light of fireflies, yes and no of light
in the lap of night
in the path of time to which I trust myself.
Pat Boran is a poet and programme director of the Dublin Writers' Festival. His most recent collection of poems is As the Hand, the Glove (Dedalus Press, 2001)
Verbale By Michele Ranchetti, translated into English by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, and into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Dublin, 176pp, €15