Alda Merini is one of Italy\'s most important, and most beloved, living poets.
A former MacArthur Fellow, she is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets..
Her other books include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses , which won the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics .
About the Author: Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including Red Rover and Columbarium , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In Stewart\'s skillful translations readers will discover a true sibyl of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
At the same time, her ironic wit, delight in nature, and affection for her native Milan underlie even her most harrowing Poems of suffering.
Whether she is working in the briefest, most incisive lyric mode or the complex time schemes of longer meditations, Merini\'s deep knowledge of classical and Christian myth gives her work a universal, philosophical resonance, revealing what is at heart her tragic sense of life.
These accessible and moving Poems reflect the experiences of a writer who, after beginning her career at the center of Italian Modernist circles when she was a teenager, went silent in her twenties, spending much of the next two decades in mental hospitals, only to reemerge in the 1970s to a full renewal of her gifts, an outpouring of new work, and great renown.
Complete with the original Italian on facing pages, a critical introduction, and explanatory notes, this collection gathers lyrics, meditations, and aphorisms that span fifty years, from Merini\'s first books of the 1950s to an unpublished poem from 2001.
In Love Lessons , the distinguished American poet Susan Stewart brings us the largest and most comprehensive selection of Merini\'s poetry to appear in English.
She has won many of the major national literary prizes and has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize--by the French Academy in 1996 and by Italian PEN in 2001.
Alda Merini is one of Italy\'s most important, and most beloved, living poets
