The Poet as Historian: On Antonella Anedda’s “Historiae”
Antonella Anedda | Historiae | New York Review of Books | April, 2023 | 160 pages
The power of poets is often measured in books, but only particular poems from their oeuvre engender the possibility of their eternal greatness. For the Italian poet Antonella Anedda, her new book of poems, Historiae, translated from the Italian and the Sardinian by Susan Stewart and Patrizio Ceccagnoli and published by NYRB in 2023, is one of her best yet, perhaps second only to Catalogue of Joy (2003). Historiae contains poems of considered intimacy as well as poems of searing introspections, some of them impressive and loyal to the artistic spirit enough to reach that eternity. “Observatory,” the first of the six sections in the book, opens with a poem called “Languages” in which Anedda offers an apt observation about her own languages—in this case, Limba and Italian—of literary introspection:
Once in a while I use a language of mine
I invent it, kneading it with the past
I don’t hand it over except in translation.
Here, the poem revisits the difficulty imagination has recreating empirical reality through literature, and its endless aspiration towards the satiable duplication of the real through the necessary abstraction of that language. Since each poem, rooted in either the personal, private history of the poet or her public reality, is essentially a retelling of extra-linguistic reality, as inaccurate to the causal, consequential accuracy of the experiences themselves, they nonetheless rival the modern poetic recastings of Greek and Roman mythologies.
Despite Anedda’s mild insistence on the insufficiency of poetic language to the objective recounting of history in the opening poem, “II” presents a haunting symbolic image of death and the enduring presence of the past. Evoking a sense of stillness and desolation, the harrowing first stanza of the poem provokes a strong contemplation into the lingering remnants of life on which the weight of the past and the cyclical nature of human experiences across time converge. The air of oppression and brutality, both features of the human and time, strides on, blowing wide their pretentious breeze of salvation or, even more perversely, of order: “They sew lead inside / the hems of the widow’s weeds / to straighten them.” Confronted by Anedda’s offish treatment of history, a reader is thus challenged, despite the poet’s taxing difficulty to face the lingering past and the declining present as the poet perceives them in all their affective splendors and transformative inhibitions.
Meanwhile, the poems that give the opening section its title are a tripartite investigation into the workings of the world. “Observation 1” opens with an assumption that courage is a precondition of existence: “The dawn gives us courage / this rising light urges us to listen / dissolving what it must,” followed by a meditation on renewal, self-examination, and the effortful process of letting go. All of these are framed by the metaphor of dawn—in which the light of dawn is personified, urging the reader to be attentive and receptive. The poem hacks back centuries to Zeno of Citium and Marcus Aurelius in its sheer celebration of stoicism, a philosophy that has now found a renewed, cult-like, though mostly superficial, following in our globalized 21st century culture:
It says:—now
begin to scour
yourself first, peeling the skin of the past from the mind
holding your nothingness between your fingers, without anger.
The poem is self-observant, bordering on nihilism, but only to make a stronger claim of purpose on the living self. Further observation, on the other hand, strikes a much bleaker note, directed outward:
Water and earth and all that they compose led to corruption,*
the beautiful and cruel life
and the face of a young nurse
that shows through the globe of the IV
indeed like a pearl on a white forehead.†
Alluding to Dante, specifically the counterargument given by the Pilgrim against Beatrice’s claim that everything God created is “incorruptible,” Anedda follows the pilgrim’s cynical view here in order to accentuate the beauty of life, however ephemeral life is condemned to be, however “corruptible” the elements that make life possible and worth enjoying. For instance, trees still strive to grow, things of the world still go on in active disregard of the inevitable. People still love, smile, and inspire each other: “other faces, other bodies shine between windows / in a suspended motion that calms us.” Life goes on, Anedda submits, despite the divine effacement of what exists through death.
Most admirably, using the figure of Dante, Anedda accentuates yet again the innate ambition of poetic allusion. Appropriating the past, the poem points outside itself in order to expand its own reach to precise meaning. It seeks to use the past as a magnifying lens for the present, the knowledge and philosophy of the old to refine and refurbish the new, and as a result of this diachronic ambition towards some sort of poetic collage, it attains an air of denser significance along the tradition of its preoccupation.
In “Observation 3” the poet gives herself completely to the definition of poetry that is language challenging itself. In this short yet difficult poem, Anedda contemplates the interconnectedness of all things—stars and soil, myth and nature, death and renewal—while implying that sequential recurrences of darkness and light, barrenness and fertility, are part of a larger, perhaps even divine, order: “Auriga, instead, shaped like a pentagon, / holds the bridle of the stars.” These observations form the introduction of the diverse thematic considerations in the book, ranging from public history, geography, immigration, climate change to personal revelations that culminate in the reminiscent and elegiac poems in which Anedda’s dead mother plays the central character.
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The poems that take their cues from public history echo the French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut’s dispiriting view that barbarism is not just the prehistory of humanity, but a faithful shadow that accompanies its every step. Anedda’s poem, “Ghazal,” carries this idea to brusque perfection:
How the rain pours on the roofs at the onset of night,
how welcoming it makes the oven’s light
between the shadowed stacks of dishes.
You know, some run away, some are slaughtered in their sleep.
At East the red confounds our West.
Blood fades into the Euphrates.
The intelligence we are so proud of
spits the past again into the present.
Anedda does not tag poetry merely as a salutation of historical and historic events of withering consequences, but rather commits her imaginative faculties to the paradoxical propensity of poetry as the salutation of history rooted in the notion that the best of times can be as productive of brute propensities as the worst.
The epigraph of the poem “Exiles,” from which the book’s title is also drawn comes from Tacitus’s Roman historical chronicle, Histories, harkening Rome’s violent past: “. . . the sea swarmed with exiles and the sea cliffs were stained with murder.” Anedda’s poem translates Tacitus’ reality to our present one with tangy irony: “Today I think of two, out of the many who drowned / just a few meters from these sunny coasts, / found under the hull, in a tight embrace.” The final phrase isalmost cheerful—seeming to alleviate the gloominess of what it proceeds—but the reality is that the latching of this cheerful phrasing to the bleak picture of death only situates our time of continuance with the brutality of Tacitus’s murderous Rome.
Anedda also writes with authoritative intensity of the plights of immigrants in Europe. In “Lesbos, 2015,” for instance, she writes about Syrians who had just fled the war from the Turkish coast. As she remarks in an interview with one of her translators, Susan Stewart, in The Paris Review, refugees arrived only to be repelled by the police, who “would not allow them to take taxis or buses.” “The poem is an attempt to reflect on what I had seen,” she says of “Lesbos, 2015.” Anedda was in Lesbos for tourism. Though she had seen such viscerally depressing events, she imagines what the refugees’ lives had they not been forced to leave their home:
They could be out hunting—but they don’t carry rifles
they cautiously advance into the olive grove
if tired they sleep
leaning their backs against the walls.
There’s a notable disconnect between the gravity of the subject matter and the relatively subdued tone of the poem. The restrained language and measured pacing—perhaps aiming for a documentary-like objectivity—risk understating the urgency and trauma of the refugees’ experience. “[F]riendly fire, oblivious like this one, enemy of children,” the poem ends. This muted approach, so typical of Anedda’s writing, fails to fully capture the terror and desperation of the situation she witnessed.
This muted, though rigorously perceptive, approach succeeds in “The West,” one of the book’s central poems. From the outset, Anedda establishes yet again a stark juxtaposition between old and new: “Here are the peasant houses of the third millennium.” This line immediately sets up a tension between traditional ways of life and the modern era. The contrast between the past and present, now juxtaposed in the geography of this cosmopolitan social setting, is further developed through the poem’s lucid imagery, which paints a picture of humble dwellings with “tiny vegetable gardens” existing quite harmoniously alongside modern conveniences like plastic furniture and nearby airports.
However, the most crucial piece in the poem is the speaker herself. Positioned “high up, shortsighted, and deafened,” she occupies a privileged yet disconnected vantage as though an historian with secondary accounts of her subject as the sole guide of her scholarship. This nonideal positioning allegorizes the wider social disconnect between different classes and communities within urban spaces.
Despite the detached tone of the poem, there is still the uncanny levitation of consciousness at play. Privileged yet empathetic, the speaker could still glean a shared discomfort between her, the observer, and the observed (termed “strangers”), hinting at a collective social conscience that contests with the realities of inequality: “In fact, in this golden age, they are out looking for iron. / This time I am near. We look at each other. / Is it really impossible to wash off this mutual shame?” The final three stanzas shift to natural imagery with quiet and playful sensitivity—from rain, winter air, to a hare, “prick[ing] up its ear towards the moon”—contrasting with the urban setting that dominates much of the poem. Nature signifies a universal experience that transcends social divisions and doubles as a representation of a yearning for a simpler, more connected way of life in which the speaker, though privileged and socially well-positioned, is not out of touch with their “strangers.” It proposes a setting in which this “mutual shame” of their definitive social division is impossible.
Anneda’s attempt to express the ironic limitation of the “[t]he intelligence we are so proud of,” of our modern advancements, brings about many poems in the book on the world’s climate crises —from “Galaxies,” “Ruinas,” “Historiae 2,” to “Swarms, Photon” and “Climate, Island, Scum.” These poems do not roam about effusing faux rodomontade about the senseless human cruelty against nature; they do not rant, nor do they sing insensibly—in neither meaning nor in their meaning-making forms. Rather, they sit on the page rather concentrated on making sense of the continuous destruction we have passively as much as actively placed upon our planet. As “Galaxies” intimates in its opening: “I dreamt that I saw the earth from far away, / I saw fields, the moon, the undertow / and how each tide undermines earth with water,” conveying a detached yet deeply unsettling perspective on humanity’s impact on the natural world.
For instance, “Climate, Islands, Scum,” the first environmentalist poem in the book, blends natural imagery with ominous undertones of destruction and contamination. The poem opens, singing the potential abundance and activity abound in nature: “How much rain sleeps / in the herd of clouds how many / swarms of bees are ready to cleave the summer.” However, this is short-lived because instantly, as though by speed of thunderbolt, “the island slides smashed against the sky,” violently altering the once resplendent landscape. What follows is a litany of absences followed by subtle intimation of lifelessness and sterility: “with no springs or meadows, no hills / of almonds and hazelnuts / always-without-flowers.” Anedda’s minimalist comprehensiveness hereby manifests itself with the conjunction that follows, “but these—sweetly radioactive—sea anemones.” This jarring, even uncouth, image thus sets the seemingly benign beauty of sea anemones beside the insidious threat of radioactivity, hinting at human-caused environmental disasters such as nuclear contamination.
However, in “Historiae 2,” Anedda reiterates, from the interview, “the obvious lesson that nature is a great deal stronger than our little selves.” Dropping completely the irony of “Climate, Island, Scum,” exemplified in the oxymoronic phrase “sweetly radioactive,” this poem approaches the same haunting and sinister terror of T. S. Eliot’s observations in The Waste Land. In just three sentences that stretch elegantly across twelve lines, Anedda shows us that soul-numbing “fear in a handful of dust” with saturnine clarity, particularly in the poem’s ending:
(oh storm made of fire and basil,
of lamps and beds askew
and you, mountain, gulping water and air)
while the house breaks up and disappears.
It is thus the existentially inevitable gloominess of our pitiable ecological history that Anedda equals and expounds in her poetry. Her authoritative exactitude marks her as one of the highest ranking poetic rarities of our time.
Yet no discussion of Anedda’s poetry and, in extension, her prominence as a first rate poet can be satisfied without a proper regard of the fact that she’s as responsible a public poet as she’s a serious private one. In her personal poems, Anedda marks this what Seamus Heaney has called the “site of energy and tension and possibility” as her primary residing space. Take, for instance, Anedda’s self-aware attitude in “’13 - ’18,” a poem about her grandfather’s harrowing experience during the great war and his equally devastating experience after:
Sometimes I fool myself that I can grasp the links between things
my grandfather in the trenches seventeen years old
who is writing love poems ignorant
of the hell still to come.
The repetition of the phrase “I see” in the final lines of the poem accentuates Anedda’s role as an observer not only in these personal poems but also throughout the book. For one, Anedda’s elegies in this book for her mother do not relegate her mother’s death nor transpose her own loss simply to the massaging of her painful feelings. Instead, she offers introduction or momentary biographies of her mother in such poems as “Words” and “Woods, Water.” Characteristic of her irony, this only amplifies the emotional toll her mother’s death attended.
Even if the elegy can be construed as mere self-pacification, Anedda nonetheless writes of her mother less out of a gripping, selfishly-necessary, and overbearing sentiment than with a commendable expressive detachment in celebration of her life.. In “Works,” for example, her mother’s existential essence becomes lovingly as well as nostalgically disinterred:
Every Saturday morning, my mother mends her skirts,
she sews and unsews, she lets out and then she takes in,
she lengthens the hems, adjusts them with ribbons,
buttons, grosgrain, velvet, satin.
There’s a restless attention that fastens her to the light
and turns her face to the fabric.
But what exactly makes “In Front of the Closet of the Dead” so central to the book? In her interview with Stewart, Anedda talks about the Sardinian tradition of singing dirges called attitos—defined as “singing lullabies for the dead”—that influenced her poetry. Lullaby and dirge exist simultaneously in the poem. It begins with a tone both tactile and evocative, describing the act of sorting through the deceased’s belongings:
You spend whole days kneeling among the fabrics,
belts, gloves pulled from the drawers
uncertain about what to donate, keep, toss,
then the incertitude finds its way: to put
your head through the thickest mountain of wool, to hold
the black of the coats, lethargically chewing
the grief that lingers like leftovers.
The book ends with a section called “Future Perfect,” featuring four short poems that further demonstrate Anedda’s shrewdness in using specific, often domestic imagery to explore profound philosophical and emotional terrain. “Future 1,” for instance, presents a series of vignettes depicting moments in an imagined future:
At this hour somebody will have just stopped dreaming
as populations migrate,
somebody will have gone to bed,
for somebody the morning will never become evening,
somebody will take out the trash
and will listen to the roar of sudden rain.
The poem’s structure, with the refrain of “somebody will,” creates a sense of inevitability and universality, each line capturing a distinct aspect of human existence—from the mundane (“somebody will take out the trash”) to the profound (“for somebody the morning will never become evening”). Ending with a touching image of a dog waiting “for food that pings in the air,” the poem brings to mind the simple yet enduring nature of hope. Tonally condensed and contemplative, “Future 2” inspires a sense of effort and renewal in the face of difficulty in its short, precisely cold articulation: “The distance is crusted with sorrow / and yet it is winter, time to plant things / to dig up the earth creaking with snow.”
Disillusioned with the power of words, Anedda presents a metapoetic reflection on the nature of language and its relationship to human experience: “You words, you must understand, / I can’t show you off anymore / with you I do harm. I can’t keep this up” (“Quarrel”). This theme of language and its relation of time is continued in “axaxa” (the only palindrome title of the book), reverberating the sense of the poem that opens the book. The poem contemplates the process of gaining clarity with age, using the metaphor of bleaching a bedsheet to represent the fading of memories or identities. The image of the “initials, / rigid with their threads, their knots, cross-stitches / of the name thick with vowels” encapsulates beautifully the idea of language and identity being intricately woven into our lives just as Anedda has woven the poems that make up Historiae with the same intricacy and professional seriousness of an historian. However, Anedda’s treatment of language and time transcends the typical scope of an historian: her cogent blend of imagery and metaphor, for instance, captures a profound understanding of the relationship between memory, identity, and the written word—a sort of depth that sets her apart from conventional historical perspectives. In this way, Anedda demonstrates a mastery of language that goes far beyond the boundary of mere documentation, which elevates her poetry to the level of an artistic expression that transforms history itself.