Franca Mancinelli’s « The Butterfly Cemetery », translated by John Taylor (Bitter Oleander Press): book reviews

• Post By: johntaylor
• Date: 10 décembre 2022
• Category: News

Franca Mancinelli‘s The Butterfly Cemetery (The Bitter Oleander Press), translated by John Taylor, has received several reviews:

1. North of Oxford, by g emil reutter: « Simply a masterpiece by Franca Mancinelli translated by John Taylor. The collection changes before your eyes, strong metaphor, imagery and while you read it you will not know that you too are transforming for your gaze will now become different. »
2. Roughghosts, by Joseph Schreiber: «  »There is a strong sense in Franca Mancinelli’s view of poetics that writing itself is a dangerous act, one that calls us to face the dark and the difficult, one that takes us into our own ‘darkroom,’ that place where we are most vulnerable. ‘Writing,’ she tells us, ‘is a soul surgery that calls for a steady hand, and a deep place to which uncertainty and tremor can be convoked. It is an act of internal self-surgery.’ And yet in the writing, there is a possibility of de-centering and being set free. Poetry (and prose) that arises from within, although grounded in direct experience and observation, allows for space and a measure of abstractedness to guide writer, and reader, from the individual toward the universal. »
3. Word City Lit, by Gordon Phinn: « [Franca Mancinelli’s] prose [in The Butterfly Cemetery] is reassuringly poetic in its narrative meander around mood and memory, spinning the reader around its spells, seductive in its textures and references, with narratives so nuanced the very order of events is subsumed in the music of their expression. Delight in sophistication of expression repeatedly tore me from the page to the haunting spells of psychic renewal. All praise to the translations of John Taylor. . . »
4. Times Literary Supplement, by Mark Glanville: « In the third part of [The Butterfly Cemetery] Mancinelli writes: ‘When we experience a trauma, we enter into a sort of apnea, sinking and detaching ourselves from reality: an almost narcotic, stunned state that makes the world seem muffled, as if under water”’ Writing poetry – ‘finding a truth guarded by words’ – has helped her breathe freely again. »
5. Tears in the Fence, by Rupert Loydell: «  »Taylor, in an intriguing ‘Postface’, considers Mancinelli’s writing with regard to ‘dualities of flux and the search for stability, using ideas of home and homelessness, place/space and elsewhere, highlighting the biographical, the physical body and notions of a more spiritual or metaphysical self’, but also a more ‘existential dilemma’ and ‘ontological resonance’ dependent upon the invisible. . . »