Poems that Open the Summer of Your Mind

The best reading experiences seem to happen in summer. You’re finally free from the overbearing school year. You get to pick up the books whose petticoats you’ve been peeking up. Yesterday I turned in my grades for the science fiction class I was teaching and felt my first afternoon of summer. I picked up The Dragonfly, the poems of Amelia Rosselli translated from the Italian by Deborah Woodard and Giuseppe Leporace, published by Chelsea Editions.  

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this beautiful book from Deborah who was one of my literature professors at the University of Washington in 1995 and who has remained a generous mentor to me ever since. And though Deborah is worlds beyond me intellectually—and, therefore, so are her interests and her work—I found The Dragonfly to be accessible. If I read it in winter or even this fall, maybe I’ll dig further into the philosophical layers and poetics, but now, in a summer state of mind, it purely entertained and infused me with the delirious logic that I love to soak in when reading poetry.  

Roselli uses repetition to dizzying effect. Do you remember how delicious it is to roll down a grassy hill? Roselli’s hills are covered in wildflowers, cottonwood puffs, feathers, leaves, grasses, strings, and as you roll you collect, becoming nestly and wild. She does this best in the title poem, “The Dragonfly,” which was originally published in Yale Italian Poetry. Here’s an example of what I mean:  

I don’t know if I rhyme from bliss or beleaguered
pain. I don’t know if I rhyme for enchantment or for reason
and don’t know if you know that I rhyme exclusively
for you. Too much sun has the sea drunk in its
placid prison, where the embroidery of the
sea refuses to lay a hand on sunken vessels.
Dawn shades to gray in the distance… (95)                               

The world of “I don’t know” rolls from intense feeling to intimacy to untamed natural imagery that is stuck in the confines of needlepoint and perspective. Here’s some more rolling and wild gathering: Read more »