Sleep

The multilingual French-born Italian poet Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996) wrote Sleep in English, between 1953 and 1966, and six poems from the collection were originally published in 1966 in Art and Literature, edited by John Ashbery and others. It is easy to see why Ashbery might have taken to Rosselli’s odd and arresting style, one without obvious parallels in the Anglosphere. The book opens by letting loose the ominous and the flawless:

hell, loomed out
with perfect hands.

Though loomed implies a large, indistinct form, Rosselli is in complete control over whatever is looming out; the proximity of the perfect hands to the loom hints at a woven monstrosity. Rosselli’s ears and hands are visible everywhere: even in the poems that are less compelling, her exceptional craft and a penchant for syllabic clamor is evident.

In his introduction, the critic Barry Schwabsky cites Rosselli: “the syllable not just as an orthographic nexus but as a sound.” As Schwabsky explains, for Rosselli “this sound that is the spoken syllable should more properly be considered a noise.”

The poet’s notion of the syllable as dissonant carries an Olsonian whiff, and offers insight into her unusual poetic sensibility:

radioactive confusion bit into my
brain radiant with multitudes. Unexpectedly
the lights warm in a heart went out
for the pleasure of separation. Encountering
the bell flashing in the eyes of
the partisan of a good cause, I
collapsed into fits of apology:
bragging into the tear-rid apostrophes
of saints.

The poem reverberates with the sounds of explosions, bells, collapses, expansions, and Rosselli draws a striking line of formal ascetism through it.

Some of the best poems in the book are love poems whose formality and artifice recall the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson. For Rosselli, every experience is a construct, where style and technique are more important than subject matter.

To call to love is but to make the name
of usury! this ever-precious stone on your

neck droops too far out of my reach and
your tender hands clasping the broom of

severity do but cut a slice into the heart
of the matter which i hold in my own trembling

fingers.