Description
American Rondeau
by Carmine Di Biase
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-935-0
2022
This collection of poems came about rather unexpectedly, as a result of Carmine Di Biase’s experience as a translator. He was translating some poems by Cesare Pavese, which eventually were published in L’anello che non tiene: journal of modern Italian literature. Those translations turned out to be a kind of apprenticeship, and Di Biase found himself writing some of his own, with no intention, at first, to publish. Some found their way into poetry journals, and eventually, when he realized there was a certain coherence among them, he assembled this chapbook, American Rondeau. The poems it contains are explorations in formal and free verse; they are all expressions, however, of a moment of feeling, a moment of life in the spaces between worlds, one European and another American. And there is a third world here as well: the literary world, in which Shakespeare figures large. This world, which Di Biase inhabits much of the time, is often, to his mind, inseparable from the world that everyone inhabits. He sees his poems, therefore, as a kind of dance in the free and open spaces between worlds, spaces where reflection and discovery are possible. For this reason, his collection opens and closes with a rondeau, and there are a couple more rondeaus in between, and a ballad as well. But all poetry must, on some level, have a pulse, a beat, a certain step, for in the end, poetry is a journey, and every journey, like every poetic form is therefore, in some way, a kind of dance.
Carmine Di Biase writes about English and Italian literature, and his poems have appeared in various journals. He also writes for academic journals and for the Times Literary Supplement. He is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he lives with six cats and his wife, who teaches music and is principal cellist for the Gadsden Symphony Orchestra.
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