Traces of Time

“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

Lucio Mariani is one of Italy’s most widely translated contemporary poets. His work restores to the lyric an ancestral, mythical sensibility that reminds us of our place in history today, at the start of a dizzying and displacing millennium. It is a poetry that reclaims for itself a centering and ethical function: a function embodied, in the past, by the likes of Eugenio Montale, or William Meredith. But Mariani goes further, in penning some of the finest poesia civile being written anywhere, in any language.” 

Translated from the Italian by Anthony Molino