Amelia Rosselli, _Sleep_

 ROSSELLI (1928-1996) had an unusually complex background. Her Italian father was an anti-Fascist dissident whom Mussolini had assassinated. Her English mother raised her in England, Switzerland, and the United States. She wrote poetry both in Italian and in English; Sleep gathers much of her poetry in English. 

Her poems in both languages are deeply idiosyncratic, full of invented words, logic-defying modifiers, and inside-out syntax: "Preparing the downfall of strips / of teasing talk was the grey upshot of the conversation / which in cannibal laughter demonstrated its impreparation." Her poems sound the way they do partly, perhaps, because she was not fully a native speaker of either Italian or English, but she seems to be using her own dislocation in language as a way of addressing a dislocated reality. 

There's a consciousness of tradition, too, as she was a great admirer of Shakespeare's sonnets. A kind of broken-and-reglued Elizabethan idiom crops up in almost every poem: 

Of mishap we know but the name, yet

our gentle brook, rook-called, (the giant

trees unfurl their tender light by the night

light of a waning moon) the giant trees

do but unfurl the development of our love,

the brook chants to the rook: --black raven

collapsing into the science of every-day

transport.

As with the Elizabethans, love and madness are frequent themes--but "themes" may be the wrong word to use about these quicksilver poems, which do not want to stay in any one place for very long. 

The back of this NYRB Books edition carries a quotation from Pasolini, which surprised me since I had read elsewhere that, though he had been helpful at times, he had serious misgivings about Rosselli's poetry, especially about its experimental and cosmopolitan aspects. In the quotation, he compares Rosselli's poems to "the most terrible laboratory experiments, tumors, atomic blasts" as a way of talking about their "stupendousness." Is there an upside to having your work compared to a tumor? 

I found the poems spell-binding, myself, although hard to describe. Every sentence makes sense while you are in the middle of it--it was only later that I went, "wait, what?" If you like immersions in sheer otherness, Rosselli is worth a look.