Abstract
Pite’s poetical debut dates back to 2003: his first book is Paths and Ladders, a collection of twentyseven free verse texts. According to Adam Piette his poetry witnesses «a devious clarity, probing ordinary encounters and daily anxieties. With quiet strength they retranscribe Romantic concerns, with ecology and the metamorphoses of the self».
In 2014 a selection of eight poems from Dantesca and Petrarchesca (two autonomous collections of texts inspired by works of Dante and Petrarch) was published in the quarterly «Lo stato delle cose». All these poems had an original «double poetical layout»: the first line offered a literary opening, in form of title-quotation of Italian verses from Petrarch’s sonnets and brief passages from Dante’s Inferno which inspired the English author, soon after followed by Pite’s new lyrics. His scholarly background seems to be predominantly literary, clearly expressed through the usage of a peculiar language and a proper style: into the framework of his narrative poetry Pites writes fragments or longer poems, uses alliterative and onomatopeic verses often linked in an enjambement strophe-structure. On the other side, the frequent appearance of the «I speaking voice» confirms the weight of the autobiographical element, thus also offering a space to the reader who «can always make contact with an authorial presence, unobtrusive and often almost transparent, but nonetheless answerable» (Roy Fisher).
In 2017 six poems (written during Pite’s visits in Rome in the late eighties and thereafter) were collected under the title Vacanze romane in «Testo a fronte». Midway between the poetical journal of a 19th century English Grand Tourist and the written jottings of a young foreign student in his twenties, it could be considered as a sort of poetical translation of a Roman journey along the streets of the city center, the vestiges of its archeological sites, the perspectives of its «natural» and modern landscape. This concise anthology of a young poet already contains all the themes and the stylistic aspects which would have been developed in the author’s later works. Since 2003 Ralph Pite continues publishing his poems in various British literary magazines: The Rialto, English, The Reader, Bristol Review of Books, The Clearing.
In 2014 a selection of eight poems from Dantesca and Petrarchesca (two autonomous collections of texts inspired by works of Dante and Petrarch) was published in the quarterly «Lo stato delle cose». All these poems had an original «double poetical layout»: the first line offered a literary opening, in form of title-quotation of Italian verses from Petrarch’s sonnets and brief passages from Dante’s Inferno which inspired the English author, soon after followed by Pite’s new lyrics. His scholarly background seems to be predominantly literary, clearly expressed through the usage of a peculiar language and a proper style: into the framework of his narrative poetry Pites writes fragments or longer poems, uses alliterative and onomatopeic verses often linked in an enjambement strophe-structure. On the other side, the frequent appearance of the «I speaking voice» confirms the weight of the autobiographical element, thus also offering a space to the reader who «can always make contact with an authorial presence, unobtrusive and often almost transparent, but nonetheless answerable» (Roy Fisher).
In 2017 six poems (written during Pite’s visits in Rome in the late eighties and thereafter) were collected under the title Vacanze romane in «Testo a fronte». Midway between the poetical journal of a 19th century English Grand Tourist and the written jottings of a young foreign student in his twenties, it could be considered as a sort of poetical translation of a Roman journey along the streets of the city center, the vestiges of its archeological sites, the perspectives of its «natural» and modern landscape. This concise anthology of a young poet already contains all the themes and the stylistic aspects which would have been developed in the author’s later works. Since 2003 Ralph Pite continues publishing his poems in various British literary magazines: The Rialto, English, The Reader, Bristol Review of Books, The Clearing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | La questione Romantica |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 1 Jun 2019 |