Davide Rondoni

A full-length monograph on the poetry of Davide Rondoni, one of ItalyΓÇÖs most active contemporary writers and thinkers. The book includes comparative studies of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, Patrizia Fazzi and Mario Luzi. The first book in English on Davide RondoniΓÇÖs poetry, this study explores how the Italian poet deals with art, and the places of art, in a way that transcends the notion of ekphrasis (or, verbal representation of pictorial art) to see poetry as the transcription of an experience with art, thus becoming a sort of anti-ekphrasis, or an atmospheric ekphrasis. The experiential, social and religious aspects of art take precedence over aesthetic concerns, without discounting them, in RondoniΓÇÖs unsentimental and unsentimentalized poetry, which takes the form of recitative theatrical monologues. Thus, art moves beyond being simple visual rhetoric, as we experience life through its full process: from originary idea, to execution, to an experience with it in the here and now.