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Grace of My Home: La grazia di casa mia
Paperback
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Publisher: Dalla Finestra Press
Pages: 280
Weight: 0.83
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
So begins this bilingual collection by Julio Monteiro Martins, a Brazilian writer who remade his literary life in Italy as a writer, translator, publisher, teacher, and mentor living his final decades in Tuscany. Published in Italy a year before his death, The Grace of My Home (La grazia di casa mia) is now available for the first time in Italian and English in this dual-language edition translated by Donald Stang and Helen Wickes, long-time students of Italian language and culture.
These are poems of exile and belonging, of passion and solitude-but they are never solemn for long. Monteiro Martins writes about love with an insomniac's raw nerve, about mortality with a shrug. A coughing fit becomes a meditation on Brazil. A wrong turn in Lucca leads to a conversation with the ghost of Puccini. A poem about windows opens onto a great-grandmother's violent death in Rio de Janeiro, then pivots to the quietly devastating observation that only a window can tell you where you've woken up this time.
Monteiro Martins writes with an exile's sensitivity to the immigration crisis blowing up in Italy during his time there, and with an exile's awareness of the sadness of being forever absent from the grace of my home. A keen student of history and politics, Julio doesn't tell us what to think-he invites us to pause and consider. He crafts a subtle, potent thread that runs through these poems, ranging from bewilderment to anger, from irony to grief.
What holds it all together is the voice-warm, sardonic, restless, and deeply human, sometimes bitter or regretful-of a poet possessed by a storyteller. From the streets of Niterói to the piazzas of Tuscany, from Haiti's spiritual landscape to the private grief of children never born, Monteiro Martins finds poetry not in the elevated or the pristine but in the mess: the stray dogs, the muddy shoes, the leftover cake.
The Grace of My Home is both a literary discovery and an invitation to read across languages-to hear a voice shaped by Brazil, refined in Italy, and now arriving, at last, in English.
The poet's experience becomes the experience of the reader. -Raffaele Taddeo
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