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Andrew Frisardi's essays in Ancient Salt are about several modern and contemporary poets--British, American, and Italian. Frisardi offers close readings of these poets, and considers their work in light of the challenges of living and writing amid the extraordinary transformations of the modern era. Some of the poets are religious, some are agnostic or perhaps atheist, but all of them articulate a human-poetic response to modernity: its pluralism, mobility, scientific discoveries, innovations, and unprecedented global awareness; as well as its rootlessness, fragmentation, dehumanizing mechanization, materialism, environmental catastrophes, and even systematic genocide. The subjects of the essays are Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959); Italian modernist Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970); Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939); Welsh poet Vernon Watkins (1906-1968); English poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine (1908-2003); English poet-editor Peter Russell (1921-2003); American poet and Alaskan homesteader John Haines (1924-2011); English poet Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns) (1943-); and American poet-critic David Mason (1954-).
Frisardi's accessible style and extensive knowledge of the thought and learning of these poets as well as of the craft of poetry makes these essays substantial nourishment for poetry lovers and students.
Andrew Frisardi is a writer, translator, editor, and critic who lives in Italy. His books include The Harvest and the Lamp (2020); Love’s Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation (2020); and annotated translations of Dante’s pre-Comedy works the Vita nova (2012) and the Convivio (2018). He is a Guggenheim fellow as well as a fellow of the Temenos Academy in London.
“Be they innovators or traditionalists, people of faith or of profound doubt, the poets whose works and worldviews Andrew Frisardi carefully unpacks in his Ancient Salt share a quality that also characterizes his own approach—a moral seriousness that is at once bracing and reassuring.Frisardi’s clear-sighted, illuminating collection amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Together, the essays present an original vision of the modern poet’s mission, which is a search not simply for novelty, but for an art that might, as Frisardi writes in his essay on Ungaretti, resurrect a world of primordial purity by novel means.”
—Boris Dralyuk, editor in chief, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Frisardi’s essays will remind readers what poetry criticism should be all about as he combines a scholar’s erudition, an accomplished poet’s knowledge of craft, and the enthusiasm of your favorite English teacher for beloved authors. His close readings explain and analyze the ideas of nine poets, particularly their spiritual and religious beliefs, with a thoroughness rarely seen in recent years, and he does so with the integrity to acknowledge his subjects’ artistic and moral shortcomings.”
—A. M. Juster, author of Wonder & Wrath
“In these lucid and penetrating essays, Frisardi brings an intense intellectual sympathy to bear on the poet’s attempt to reintegrate, in the act of poetic making, his or her sense of a fragmented cosmos, including the hidden cosmos of the self. . . . Frisardi’s careful close readings re-narrate each poet’s imaginative pilgrimage toward a larger apprehension of belonging, coherence, and unity, that punctum where ‘eternity flows into time.’”
—Sally Thomas, author of Motherland
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