Traces of Time

<p>&quot;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.&quot; - Rosanna Warren</p><p>Culled from his entire career, the poems in <i>Traces of Time</i> cover numerous themes, most prominently the poet's relationship to history and how poetry can exist outside of it. &quot;Tiananmen, 20 Years Later,&quot; &quot;Protocols of War,&quot; and &quot;Checkmate&quot; (about 9/11) all illustrate Lucio Mariani's concerns &quot;through images both dense and porous, lines both cadenced and spasmodic,&quot; and confirm his place in contemporary poetry.</p><p><b>&quot;Protocols of War&quot;</b><br>(Baghdad is not far) </p><p>Of this time you'll gather no memories<br>for your eternal hunger.<br>Can't you see the slags in the weave<br>that enfolds the flesh of the living?<br>Can't you see that the boxes and drawers<br>where the silver of bygone days abounds<br>have no room for trinkets or seashells<br>of a present founded on plaster markets,<br>lost facing a mirror<br>seeking itself in the halls of the world?<br>Don't you see that for the first time<br>every man erects ruins for his heirs<br>enacting inane protocols of war<br>while the future slams its shutters tight<br>so as to celebrate on statistical altars<br>the glory of mindless marionettes<br>maneuvered by nothingness,<br>sprung in the bitter fields of oblivion?<br>Of this time you'll gather no memories.</p><p><b>Lucio Mariani</b> is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including <i>Echoes of Memory</i> (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.</p><p><b>Anthony Molino</b> 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.</p>