Franca Mancinelli’s « The Little Book of Passage » reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Mark Glanville

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 24 août 2019
• Category: News

Mark Glanville has reviewed Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage (The Bitter Oleander Press) in the Times Literary Supplement. An excerpt:

« Though [The Little Book of Passage] is brief and its language plain, her subject, treated with respect, modesty and delicacy, is the great undertaking of all major poets—to discover, as her excellent translator John Taylor puts it, ‘the genuine sources of what we feel, think, dream and [which] remain at a remove. . . it is the task of poetry to try to bridge those gaps or at least to show where the bridges might be built’. Mancinelli explores the fault lines (‘faglie’) across which religions attempt to build bridges that philosophers would remove, using the third way, poetry. [. . .] Mancinelli’s book is prefaced by a quote from Emily Dickinson: ‘To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that caused it–’. Her exposition of these words is realized in a remarkably mature poetic voice, sincere and humble in its search for meaning, worthy of the awards and accolades she has been accumulating. »