Traces Of Time (Open Letter International Poetry Series) - Softcover

"Lucio Mariani's Traces of Time is a book of insinuating wisdom and delight. The poems are lyric, lucid, and often brief, but they never feel slight because they ponder, on a tangibly human scale, the secrets of of existence. . . . There are few books of poems in which I like every poem. This is one of them." -Dana Gioia

"Mariani is a poet of a direct but careful music, formal integrity, a commitment to history, and a sharp wit capable of grand beauty and excoriating irony." -Publishers Weekly

"Lucio Mariani's Traces of Time indeed traces almost forty years of his work as a lyric poet of sparest, most incisive, means. Following the course of myth, history, and the city of Rome that sustains him, Mariani reveals the frailty of our understanding and the paradoxes of our desires, aware that the poet's task is to find a form in which what is cherished can endure. The interlocutors of Mariani's poems are those who need them: his loves and enemies, his friends and strangers, and, most of all, his descendants--his readers, now and in the future."--Susan Stewart

"Mariani has emerged as one of the few significant post-Montalian poets in Italy, and Molino is a graceful, experienced, thoroughly reliable translator. The result is an elegant book, an important book, bringing a distinctive voice into English."—Rosanna Warren

Culled from his entire career, the poems in Traces of Time cover numerous themes, most prominently the poet's relationship to history and how poetry can exist outside of it. "Tiananmen, 20 Years Later," "Protocols of War," and "Checkmate" (about 9/11) all illustrate Lucio Mariani's concerns "through images both dense and porous, lines both cadenced and spasmodic," and confirm his place in contemporary poetry.

"Protocols of War"
(Baghdad is not far)

Of this time you'll gather no memories
for your eternal hunger.
Can't you see the slags in the weave
that enfolds the flesh of the living?
Can't you see that the boxes and drawers
where the silver of bygone days abounds
have no room for trinkets or seashells
of a present founded on plaster markets,
lost facing a mirror
seeking itself in the halls of the world?
Don't you see that for the first time
every man erects ruins for his heirs
enacting inane protocols of war
while the future slams its shutters tight
so as to celebrate on statistical altars
the glory of mindless marionettes
maneuvered by nothingness,
sprung in the bitter fields of oblivion?
Of this time you'll gather no memories.

Lucio Mariani is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Echoes of Memory (available in English from UPNE), as well as a volume of essays, a collection of short stories, and translations of works by César Vallejo, Tristan Corbière, and Yves Bonnefoy.

Anthony Molino is a translator from the Italian, an anthropologist, and a psychoanalyst. In addition to Lucio Mariani's two volumes, he has also translated works by Valerio Magrelli and Antonio Porta, among others.