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My Books

"We imitate our loves"  (W.H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron, IV)
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Rupert Brooke: a name, a legend. This is how Virginia Woolf, who had known him well, described him in a beautiful portrait.

The brilliant student and Rugby athlete, the scholar who contributed to the rediscovery of Donne and Webster, the Fellow of King’s College at Cambridge. The fascinating magnet who attracted friends and artists to Grantchester, the village outside Cambridge where he lived in his later years. The poet of transience, the precariousness of beauty that quickly fades, admired by Pound, Eliot, and Fitzgerald. The generous friend who left his literary legacy to Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie and Walter de la Mare, so that they could write without practical worries. The dreamer who wrote poetry in the garden, barefoot on the grass, a vegetarian avant la lettre.

This and much more is Rupert Brooke, not just the poet of the “war sonnets” that gave him fame of war poet. “The Great Lover”: of poetry, of friends, of England. Dead while going to the Dardanelles, Brooke was buried on an island in the Aegean Sea by his soldier comrades, destined to fall shortly after him, also “colored shadows”, “paler than the pale light of the waves, / Breaking into phosphorus in the night”, as his wrote in one of his last fragments.

This biography is an act of poetic, historical and philological restitution of the real Rupert Brooke.

“If you want the old Battalion, / We know where they are / They’re hanging on the old barbed wire”

That’s how an English folk song goes, summarizing the fate of many young poets who volunteered for the Western Front. Their idealistic drive was soon replaced, in the mud of the trenches, by the bitter experience of death on the battlefield, among the barbed wire, the whistling of grenades, and the suffocating grip of gas. Yet, in this ghostly scenario, those boys found the time to write, to cling to life and leave a memory of themselves: thus were born poems, notes, letters to family members of desperate honesty against the madness of war. This collection returns the voices of a lost generation, bearing witness to its dramatic yet crystalline quest for truth.

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Emily Brontë
 
Emily Brontë’s life is made up of just a few real facts: everything happens in her powerful imagination and in the visionary silences from behind which she observes the outside world. She has a way of prising narratives from the wind and the heather, the beloved moor scenery that she never wants to leave: the «world within», the «God within my breast» of the great poems also produce a unique, terrific novel in Wuthering Heights. Beyond the literary myth created after her death, the blending of biography and artistic conception, the balance between reality and passion, the modernity of a young woman fighting to be «herself» and «free», emotionally and spiritually, combine to reveal an extraordinary lyrical voice.
Her short, difficult and ecstatic life touches modern readers with a sense of loss but also of immensity and strength, for Emily confides to us her aspiration to happiness and the blaze of her fears: «Fingers tipped / with ink, she carries boundless worlds» Rosie Garland has written. And those «boundless worlds» Emily Brontë was able to tie to mortal earth and share with all of us.
ISBN 9788869733826
https://www.salernoeditrice.it/rassegna-stampa/  

Sognatori, poeti, viaggiatori.

Sguardi su Verona e il Lago di Garda

 

From Boccaccio to Dickens, from D’Annunzio to Ruskin, from Rossini to Maderna: numerous are the writers, musicians, painters and exponents of the great world who, at various times, visit Verona, attend it and “dream” of it, thus transforming it into a true myth.

Inspired by literary stories, in Shakespeare’s ‘fair Verona’, their imagination has always and effortlessly merged with reality: here the artists’ inventio, the charm of architecture and the beauty of the landscape have become testimonials in diaries and narrative pages, in verse, in music and in copious correspondence.

The obligatory visit of the Grand Tour in the twentieth century, Verona’s charm continues beyond the city walls, with the opening towards the nearby hills and the blue of Lake Garda.

The essays, written by experts and renowned scholars from Italian Universities, are accompanied by picturesque images of the city.

​ISBN: 978-88-8455-703-2

English version (translation by John Francis Phillimore, www.philipmorre.com)

 IBSN 9788864644066

Boonrod

Boonrod is a creature born on the street in Thailand and destined for a vagabond’s life.

Everything changes for him thanks to a chance meeting with the boy Atid, who gives him love and a real home.

A perfect mutual understand soon grows up between them, a friendship coloured by nostalgia and suspended, as in a fairy-story, between the enchantment of childhood and the lush beauty of the tropical landscape. This happy interlude comes to an abrupt end when Boonrod, once more on his own, must confront pain and anguish, cruelty and death.

Salvation comes at the eleventh hour and he will be given the chance of starting over again, with a new life.

(translation by John Francis Phillimore, www.philipmorre.com)

ISBN 9788864643762

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Click here for the extract

The friendship and the experiences of a group of friends living in Venice: Boris, a Russian poet living in town, the Venetian pianist Edoardo, Patrizia, Clara and Giulia. Giulia who disappears from their lives forever and Clara who will shuts herself off from the world. 

One main protagonist acts however both as scenery, Leitmotif and container of dreams: the city of Venice. The stories and the characters that revolve around Venice are the result of the imagination but also “seal” a bit all that “the heart has been able to remember”. 

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Click here for the extract

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ISBN 8881147831

In the English Style

Images and scenes from the pages of well-known authors - from Keats to Richard Le Gallienne, Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot - The distinctive features of a great civilization that over the centuries have made it a model of elegance and democracy. 

SKU 0101540R11

Landscapes in Literature

​​ISBN 88-8358-363-9

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