Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works,The Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, The Decameron,
andThe Canterbury Tales, among them. What most people aren’t aware of is that he was also a visual artist (who produced drawings and paintings), a novelist, a playwright, and a
(left-wing) journalist, and that he also published 19 books of poems during his lifetime. A half-dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if
one were to read all of these, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader. For the first time,
Anglophones will be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically-motivated volumes currently
available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini il poeta’s oeuvre, giving English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose
verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres, but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for
which he is most known in the US today.
